


In the Woods

by andtheblueberrymuffins



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, Feelings, Gore related to hunting?, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, Mystery, Plot, Slow Burn, Stranded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-02-16 15:32:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13056873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andtheblueberrymuffins/pseuds/andtheblueberrymuffins
Summary: Something wet and cold splatters against Allura’s cheek.A moment later, a second drop lands on her forehead, and she groans, raising a hand to rub at her face. She feels… groggy, as though she just woke from a long, deep sleep. The wetness on her face makes no sense. She cracks her eyes open and finds that she is staring up at a gray sky, full of storm clouds, heavy with rain.This is not where she last remembers being.Or: The one where Allura and Shiro end up lost in space.





	1. Chapter 1

Something wet and cold splatters against Allura’s cheek.

A moment later, a second drop lands on her forehead, and she groans, raising a hand to rub at her face. She feels… groggy, as though she just woke from a long, deep sleep. The wetness on her face makes no sense. She cracks her eyes open and finds that she is staring up at a gray sky, full of storm clouds, heavy with rain.

A drop falls on her mouth, and she coughs, scrubbing it roughly away and sitting. The world reels for a moment, vertigo tilting the ground, which is damp and covered with some kind of soft grass. That isn’t right. None of this is right. 

“Hello?” Allura calls, swaying to her feet. She’s wearing her dress. Her hair hangs heavy across her shoulders. She turns in a slow circle, her slippers soaking in the moisture from the dew-heavy grass. She is in some kind of clearing. Trees ring her in, their trunks thick and covered with a faintly luminescent moss. The foliage is thick. Strange, sparkling flowers line the branches. The falling rain whispers off of the leaves, echoing eerily around the clearing.

This is not where she last remembers being.

Allura folds her arms, rubbing at her sleeves. The air has a bite to it. “Hello,” she says, once more, straining her ears for any answer. “Hello, is anyone there?”

“Princess?” Shiro’s voice comes from behind her, and the upward rush of anxiety in her chest slows, at least somewhat. She is not alone. Wherever they are, at least they are there together. 

She turns towards his voice, calling, “Yes, I’m here. Are you alright?”

He steps out from the tree line, clad in his armor. He appears uninjured, and something in his expression relaxes as he catches sight of her. “I’m fine. Just confused. Where—”

And it is then that the sky opens.

#

The rain comes down hard and sudden, in stinging drops that smart against exposed skin and plaster cloth to flesh in moments. Allura exclaims in surprise and she darts forward, towards Shiro and the trees. 

“Follow me,” he says, yelling to be heard over the cacophony of the rain and sudden wind; at least there seems to be no lightning. “There was a cave. That’s where I woke up.”

They slog through leaf mold and fallen branches as the leaves above them gather the rain and funnel it onto their heads and down the backs of their necks. The rain is cold, setting shivers in Allura’s bones but, at least, ensuring she is completely awake by the time Shiro leads her to a well-worn cliff face. There is an indent along the stone that could, given the right lighting and a forgiving attitude, be broadly considered a cave.

“Come on,” Shiro says, ducking under the overhang and gesturing her in. Allura presses in without even thinking about arguing. The overhang is not much; it does not really offer enough shelter for two people. It would barely serve one. Shiro shifts to put his back to the rain. He flashes her a brief smile and says, “There. That’s better, right?”

Allura narrows her eyes. She can see the water running down his armor. It’s cold enough that their breath steams in the air. “There’s more space,” she says, grabbing him and pulling him further beneath the overhang. They end up pressed together—he makes a surprised sound at the movement, catching himself with a hand near her shoulder—but at least he is mostly out of the rain.

“Ah,” he says, from above her head. “Thanks.” He moves his hand off of the wall, but then seems unsure where to place it. It ends up, a few ticks later, right back where it started. She shifts her feet, trying to avoid the water filling up her slippers and the awareness of how close he is. She bumps his boot. “Sorry,” he says, and she laughs.

“It’s—this is ridiculous,” she says, because it is. “I don’t even know where we are.”

“You know,” he says, “I was really hoping you did.”

#

“What is the last thing you remember?” Allura asks, as the rain continues to dump out of the sky. Her sodden clothes leech the heat from her body. She’s begun shivering and cannot seem to stop, not even with Shiro pressed so close. “Before waking up here?”

“Uh.” Shiro shifts, curling his shoulders further out of the water. “Good question. We were… touring the Thyshilian Palace, weren’t we?”

The Thyshilians were a people that had seemed very interested in joining the Coalition. They’d been welcoming, providing a huge banquet and insisting on showing the crew around their capital city. They’d offered a special tour of the palace to Allura and Shiro, as a sort of preamble to forming an alliance….

“Yes,” Allura says, remembering the palace’s tall ceilings and wide halls, full of gold pillars and green walls. The Thyshilians were not a particularly statuesque species; Allura can remember wondering why their palace was built to such a scale. She frowns, trying to remember more. “That’s right. They showed us the throne room, and then they said….”

Her memory ends there. It just… stops. She can recall that the Thyshilians said something, but that is all. 

“Right, yeah,” Shiro says. “They—there was that glowing pit in the floor, right?” The glowing pit had been in front of the two tremendously huge thrones. It looked like a bowl full of galaxies, with brightly glowing points of light swirling through the dust of tiny nebulae. “Why can’t I remember anything after that?”

Allura shudders, not just from the cold this time. She curls her arms around her chest. “I am not sure. But I can remember nothing past that, either. They must have incapacitated us somehow and… brought us here. Wherever here is.”

“It’s not Thyshill,” Shiro says, and Allura nods. Thyshill was an arid planet; the Castle’s scans had picked up no such verdant areas on its surface.

“Agreed. Perhaps a moon,” she says, rubbing at her arms once more. Wondering about where they are seems less fraught than considering how they got there. And then a chilling thought occurs to her. “The others, they could be here as well.”

“It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to leave them behind,” Shiro agrees, grim-voiced. “But they didn’t call out.”

“They could still be unconscious.” Unconscious and out in this rain. Allura shudders at the thought. “Or perhaps they are just farther away.”

Shiro twists, looking out through the pouring rain. They’ve lost visibility; Allura can only see a dozen feet in any direction before the world dissolves into gray. A fog rises up from the ground, blending with the heavy rain. “We have to go look for them,” he says.

“Yes.” Allura does not look forward to it, but the others are their responsibility. “We can meet back here—”

“We should stay together,” Shiro says, sharp. “We don’t know what’s going on or what’s out there.”

Allura almost protests. They’ll cover more ground individually. But he is not wrong. Anything could be out there. And the storm is only worsening. “Alright,” she agrees. “Shall we?”

#

Searching through the forest is every bit the experience Allura anticipated it to be. The ground is soft, attempting to swallow their feet with each step. The fog clings to her skirts, hiding branches and bracken and roots. And the rain is an oppressive presence, weighing down her hair and clothes. She envies Shiro his armor and short locks. 

They march through the storm, calling out for the others until Allura grows hoarse. They receive no answers and catch no glimpses of familiar bodies. “I don’t think they’re here,” Shiro says, finally. They’ve made their way to another cliff face. Allura has no idea how high it goes. The rain obscures everything over their heads.

“Maybe they got away from the Thyshilians,” she says, through her chattering teeth. “They were out in the city. And they are resourceful. They could be coming to get us right now.” They could not be too far away, after all. The Thyshilians did not have wormhole technology.

“Yeah, maybe,” Shiro says, turning to look at her and blinking, his expression shifting quickly as he steps closer. “Princess,” he says, touching her hands and then her cheeks, cursing. “You’re like ice.”

“I am alright,” she says. She can survive being cold. The temperatures are not severe enough to seriously threaten her well-being.

Shiro gapes at her and then shakes his head. “No, you’re really not. Come on, we need to find some kind of shelter.” She means to argue, she truly does, but a shiver shakes her hard and it weakens her position, somewhat. So she follows as he searches along the face of the cliff, until they find a crack in the stone.

It is a few feet off of the ground, above the fog, narrow and too short for even Allura to stand up within it. It extends back into the stone. It looks dry inside. “Come on,” Shiro says again, all but lifting her up into it. He follows a moment later, and the sudden absence of heavy drops on Allura’s head and shoulders temporarily disorients her. The loss makes her more aware of the shivers chasing one another around her skin. She blinks down at her shaking hands.

“Alright,” Shiro says, frowning and drawing her attention. “You need a fire. Well, we’re not going to get a fire right now. So. So, you need out of those clothes.”

Allura stares at him. Her face makes an admirable effort to heat and does not succeed. She says, “Excuse me?”

“They’re completely soaked,” he says, his own cheeks reddening. “You’re not—you won’t be able to get warm. And we need to warm you up.” He takes another look at her and his frown deepens. “Quickly.” He reaches for the buckles on his chest armor.

She asks, through her chattering teeth, “What are you doing?”

He glances at her and then quickly away. His ears are completely red. “Body heat is about all I can offer, right now. My armor kept most of the cold out,” he says, setting his armor to one side and pulling at his gloves. “Come on.”

“I,” she says, and then stops. She is very, very cold. Standing still makes the chill inside of her more obvious. “Alright,” she agrees, her numb fingers clumsy with the closures for her dress. She almost asks for assistance but that would be… too much. She struggles onward, until she can peel the sodden fabric off of her shoulders, and down her arms, where it clings and resists.

She kicks it away, crossing her arms over the under-shift that she still wears. It is wet too, but she’s not ready to part with it. Her hair hangs heavy over her shoulders and down her back, holding, if it is possible, even more water than her dress. 

“Okay,” Shiro says, his voice curiously strangled, “that’s—okay. I’m just going to…. Your hair is—can you just?” He wrings his hands in a gesture that seems clear enough. Allura nods, reaching up and twisting her hair, splattering water everywhere. “Great,” he says, “that’s, alright, now we’ll just, uh.” He settles back against the rock and waves her over.

She should protest, probably. But he looks warm and she is very, very cold. She shuffles over and, after a moment where she strives and fails to find a graceful way to sit, she cautiously leans against him. “There we go,” he says, hesitantly wrapping an arm around her, and then the other. He is startlingly warm, the difference in their temperatures driving a breath from her. She presses closer, quite without intention.

“I’ve got you,” he says, rubbing his hands up and down her back, the friction doing less to warm her than the heat radiating from his skin. She tucks her hands up against his chest and presses her face to his throat, and, while she does not get warm, the cold at least stops hurting enough for exhaustion to claim her.

#

Soft snores wake Allura. She blinks open gummy eyes and finds she is staring at Shiro’s throat. Because they slept in a cave after she stumbled into hypothermia. Because they walked around in the icy rain for vargas looking for the others. Because they woke up, somehow, on an unknown world.

Allura groans, achy and with a headache that stomps around her skull like an unbroken bloach. She is, at least, warmer than she remembers being, something that she must attribute largely to Shiro’s body heat. His arms are still curled around her and they tighten when she shifts. It brings more heat to her face. She’s wearing only her shift. She can feel his heart beating through the thin fabric of his shirt. It is…

She clears her throat, and says, “Shiro, wake up.”

“Hm?” He stirs immediately, his grip tightening further, as though his automatic reaction is to gather her closer. One of his hands flattens across her back, large and warm, and she fights a shiver that has little to do with the cold.

“It is morning,” she says, tugging against his hold before her ears heat any further.

“What?” He sounds as though he swallowed gravel in his sleep. “Oh, right.” He releases her when she shifts once more, and she finds herself hunched in the cave they found, a chill creeping back into her skin. The rain stopped, at some point in the night, making way for a morning suffused with pale sunlight. Outside the cave, birds of some kind chirp. He looks sleepy and confused, soft, with a hint of stubble across his jaw.

She looks away, swallowing, and says, “Thank you.” She nudges at the pile of her dress with one toe. It is still soaking wet, unsurprising since she left it in a lump near the mouth of the cave. “For last night.”

“Anytime,” he says, and then makes a soft, miserable sound. She knows he did not mean it the way it sounded, but keeps her face turned aside, anyway, because she can feel her cheeks warming. “You know,” he says, after a moment, clearing his throat, “I was really hoping yesterday was a dream.”

“Mm,” she agrees, abandoning the dress for the moment and stepping down out of the cave. The morning air smells pleasant, though the ground is still soft and mushy under her ruined slippers. He joins her a moment later, stretching his arms and then rubbing at one shoulder with a little wince. She turns in a slow circle and asks, to the universe at large, “Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” he says, frowning skyward. “But we need to find some food. And, if we’re going to spend another night here, some better shelter.”

“I’m sure the others will find us before that,” she says, holding onto that belief. Surely by now their disappearance has been noticed. The others will question the Thyshilians and track them down. They are probably even now coming to pick them up from wherever they are. They must be. Allura’s stomach grumbles and she sets aside those thoughts. “But some food sounds like a good idea.”

#

Securing food turns out to be a more difficult prospect than Allura initially anticipated. “I don’t recognize any of these plants,” she admits, as they come to a stop near a steam that seems to have overflowed its banks. They have been marching through the forest for vargas. It is easier to move without her full skirts. It seemed like madness to drag back on the freezing, damp fabric. Besides, the day is growing rapidly hotter. Sweat is already gathering under her hair. Still, she feels… uncomfortable in only her shift. 

“What?” Shiro asks, sounding distracted. When she looks over her shoulder to ensure he is alright, he looks quickly away, red creeping up his throat. “I mean, yeah, I don’t either.” He grimaces. “Obviously.”

She sighs, leaning back against the nearest tree and rubbing at her forehead. She is quite hungry. “Anything here could be poisonous to either one of us,” she says, looking at the fruit growing up in the branches overhead. It shimmers, faintly. Coran always advised against eating anything that put off its own light, despite the Altean digestive system’s ability to handle near anything.

She worries more about Shiro. She has heard from Hunk about some of the many allergies humans suffer from.

Shiro nods, crouching by the stream and dipping his fingers into the water. He cups his palm and raises some water to his nose, where he sniffs at it before cautiously taking a sip. He makes a pleased sound and brings more to his mouth. He says, after swallowing, “Well, we can go without for another few days. It won’t kill us. And at least there’s water.”

Allura’s stomach aches at just the thought of going a few days without food; she remembers what that feels like; things got… very lean, before her father forced her to sleep for so long. But there is nothing to be done about it. She hums and sinks down beside Shiro, drinking her fill. Storm clouds are gathering along the horizon once more.

She says, eying them and thinking of the rain they promise, “About that shelter.”

#

They return to their little cave. It is not much, but it is, thus far, the best starting point they have. The clouds are building up fast. “I think we can make something to cover the entrance,” Shiro says, frowning at the surrounding trees. “It’ll at least keep the rain out.”

Allura nods, willing to go along with it. She has no experience building shelters from trees, but it seems mostly to involve gathering branches and, eventually, vines. If nothing else, their current location supplies plenty of both materials, though Allura must climb the trees to get the best vines.

“I can do that,” Shiro says, before she starts up one of the trunks, and she arches a brow at him.

“I spent most of my childhood up trees,” she tells him, leaping to grab the first branch and pulling her body up. 

“Oh yeah?” She hears him moving around below, gathering more sticks, grumbling something about how wet all of the wood is. “Why is that?”

“Mostly I was hiding from one tutor or another,” she says, continuing upward. The bark is rough and the moss that covers the branches is prickly beneath her hands. Her shift snags on a gnarled branch and she grimaces when it tears, just a little. She’s almost reached the height the vines seem to prefer.

“I find that hard to believe,” he calls up from below, as she reaches the first of the vines and tears it off of the branch.

She harvests the half-dozen vines grown off of her current tree and shimmies down quickly, jumping the last dozen feet to land in a crouch. She grins crookedly up at Shiro, lost in the woods, wearing a torn shift and ruined slippers, her hair an utter mess, and says, “I was not always the proper lady you see before you.”

She expects him to laugh—they could both use a laugh—but his expression goes soft and warm, instead. He offers her a hand to stand, and she takes it, before turning her head and coughing. “It’s nothing,” she says, when she catches the look on his face. “Just something in my throat.”

“Sure,” he says, frowning. “Come on, let’s get this done.”

#

Together they whip the branches and vines into something almost like a movable wall. Allura feels unusually hot by the time they finish, and dizzy. The first drops of rain land on her head and she blinks up at the sky dumbly, a chill shaking her despite the uncomfortable warmth in her skin.

“Come on,” Shiro says, guiding her towards their little cave and pulling the branch-wall into place with a wary look at the sky. The rain starts in earnest moments after they get settled, beating down on the world outside with a vengeance. Allura stares at it for a moment, and then turns her head and coughs against her arm.

“Maybe if we’re still here tomorrow we’ll be able to figure out a fire,” Shiro says, settling down near her and offering her a wan smile. “What do you think?”

“I hope,” Allura says, coughing again on the end of the words, “that we’re not here tomorrow.” She pulls her legs up and wraps her arms around them, resting her head on her knees. She’s hungry and her head hurts. She’s so tired.

#

A fever takes Allura in the night. She should have expected as much. Nothing has gone properly since they arrived wherever they are. She wakes with gummy eyes and dizzy thoughts to Shiro’s frowning face as he leans over her. He touches her forehead and hisses, “You’re burning up.”

“I’m fine,” she argues, but the cough that follows the words belies her point. 

Shiro presses his lips thin, not dignifying her ridiculous claim with a response. He rocks back on his heels, turning his scowl over to the mouth of their cave. Allura can still hear the pounding of the rain. She wonders if it is even morning. 

“I’m cold,” she says, unthinking, opening eyes she did not realize she shut. The cave is dark. Her head feels light as a cloud, which is strange considering her limbs are all so heavy. The cold, damp air settles across her, chilling her bones. She tries to curl into a tighter ball, confused by the black fabric covering her hands. She’s wearing a shirt that’s too big on her. She doesn’t remember where it came from.

“I know,” Shiro says, adjusting the way he holds her. She does not remember being held. Was she not sleeping on the floor? His heart beats like a steady drum under her ear. “I know, I’m sorry. The rain is going to stop soon, okay? And then we’ll get you out in the warm sun. The others will find us. Just—just sleep for now, okay?”

She nods. It is an instruction she does not need. Her eyelids are so heavy. Her throat hurts. She lets the fever take her back into mad, disjointed dreams.

#

The next time Allura remembers waking up, she is being lifted. She makes a bleary sound, meant to be a question. Something in her chest rattles. “I’ve got you,” Shiro says, shifting his grip. Her head rolls on his shoulder, and she fumbles a hand out, trying to grab at his shirt for stability. She finds nothing but skin, patting ineffectually at him.

“What’s going on?” she asks, regretting the question when it sparks another fit of coughing.

“We’re moving,” Shiro says. “Here, can you hold this?” He hands her a piece of his armor, the chest plate, she thinks. She blinks at it, not sure this isn’t another fever dream. She grabs it with fingers that feel only vaguely under her control. “Great,” he says, “just keep it over your head, okay?”

She manages to stop coughing long enough to ask, “Why?”

“Because it’s the best umbrella we’ve got.”

Allura props it over her head, too dizzy to argue. “Are we going out in the rain?”

“I’m afraid so,” Shiro says, and he sounds like he is. He moves, then, shuffling forward in an awkward crouch. Allura listens to the rain beating against the rock and their make-shift tent-flap, and then they are out in it. Shiro curses; the rain is startlingly cold. It sounds like he’s splashing through water.

“Go back,” Allura gasps, icy drops beating down at her exposed skin. She coughs and nearly drops the piece of armor. 

“I wish I could,” Shiro says, yelling to be heard over the rain, “but the rain hasn’t stopped for almost two days. The cave is flooding, and the water is still rising. Quickly. We have to move, now.”

Allura tries to process that. It would be so much easier if the world didn’t feel hidden by thick fog. She asks, her body quaking, the cold bringing a brief sharpness to her thoughts, “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Shiro says, and for the first time, he sounds lost. “High ground, I hope.”

“I can walk,” Allura says, before considering if that is truthful or not.

Shiro snorts above her. “You rest,” he says. “We’ll find a new place soon.”

#

They do not find a new place soon. At least, Allura does not think so. Time gets funny, or stays funny, or… She drifts, anyway. She is aware, from a remove, that the floodwaters continue to rise, dragging at Shiro’s legs, shoving him around as they get deeper.

“Leave me,” she tells him, when the waters finally knock him down, plunging them both into grimy, freezing wetness, before he snags her back and pulls her up and out of it. She loses her grip on his chest plate as the water tumbles her.

He spits out water and snaps, “No.” He shifts the way he holds her, so that her arms are around his neck, her legs hanging around his waist. She cannot muster the energy to hold on tightly. 

“Making you slow,” she says, aware that she is no longer shivering and distantly sure that’s a bad sign. “Going to drown if you—”

“I said no,” he yells, still barely heard over the rain and the churning water, the sounds of panicking wildlife around them.

She coughs against his shoulder. It hurts. “Shiro—”

“I’m not leaving you behind, Princess,” he grinds out, and then, a moment later, “Hold on. I think I see a way up.”

#

The way up is a muddy, narrow path up a cliff face—Allura is not sure if it is the same cliff that held their cave, or an entirely different one. The rain water flows down it, threatening at every moment to turn it into a slide. Allura stares at the rabbiting pulse in Shiro’s neck, watching rain slide down his skin, understanding that the heat radiating from his chest is the only thing keeping her from freezing solid.

#

They find flat, solid ground eventually, somehow. Shiro sways at the top of the cliff, breathing like a bellows, rain blowing away from his mouth every time he exhales. “Just… just a little farther,” he says, as though he has some idea where they are going.

Maybe he does. 

Allura blinks dazedly out across the rain-soaked world—visibility is better up wherever they presently are—and realizes that maybe she does, too. “House,” she says, through her sore, scratching throat. 

“What?” Shiro asks, turning in the direction she points when she manages to marshal the strength necessary to raise her arm. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he says, after a moment, barking a rough laugh. “A house.”

It is… not much of a house, Allura notices, as they approach it. Ruins might be more apt. Tumbled walls of stone, covered in moss, stand amidst overgrown trees and shrubs. There is no door, but that is not an issue. There are plenty of collapsed spots in the walls.

Shiro steps over a pile of fallen stone, into a dark space that smells strongly of damp and moss. Allura makes a sound, startled by the absence of rain after so long. “If anything is living in here,” Shiro says, talking loudly, “this is your opportunity to clear out, alright? We don’t want a fight, but we’re not leaving.”

Nothing replies. Allura is not entirely certain he actually spoke. She blinks and when she opens her eyes again they are sitting, backed into a corner. Shiro shivers around her, rubbing his hands up and down her arms. Her head is tucked beneath his chin. Allura coughs, and he says, “Sh, sh, sleep.”

So she does.

#

Allura sleeps and when she wakes it is to a world made of pain, gone fuzzy around all the edges. “You have to drink this,” Shiro tells her, because he is there, holding up her head and trying to get her to swallow something. She tries, but coughing gets in the way. Her stomach is a ball of aching hunger. She cannot remember feeling like this ever in her life.

Shiro, she notices, in a bleary, distant way, looks little better than she feels. There are dark bags under his eyes. His lips are pale and cracked. Dark, prickly hair is swallowing his face. Dirt and abrasions cover his skin.

“Hey there, Princess,” he says, when she turns her face away from the curved stone he’s trying to get her to drink from. “It’s just water.”

“No water,” she coughs. She’s had enough of water. 

“The rain stopped,” he tells her, something very much like relief in his voice. “Come on, try to drink this.”

She tries. But it does nothing to ease her mouth or throat or the terrible pain in her stomach. Passing out again is a relief. At least she feels nothing when she is unconscious.

#

“Allura,” Shiro says. He’s shaking her shoulder, not gently. His voice is too loud.

“Stop,” she mumbles, waving a hand at him.

“No,” he says, pulling on her more, until she is half-sitting, leaning against his side. She curls against him, once there. He is warm and she is so very, very cold. “I…” Shiro starts, and she hears him swallow. He is turning something over and over in his hands. It glitters faintly. “I don’t know when the others are going to find us. But I don’t think it’s going to be—you have to eat something. You need strength. You’re getting—you need to eat.”

Allura’s stomach cramps at the mention of food. She does not know how long it’s been since they ate anything. Days, at least. She has lost too much time. “Not safe,” she reminds him, knuckling at her gut.

“Maybe not,” Shiro says. He presses his face against her hair. She wonders why. He clears his throat, after a moment. “But it—I don’t think it matters anymore. If you don’t get stronger, soon, you’re going to—you need to get stronger. So. So we’re going to eat this.”

He holds the shimmery fruit up, and she stares at it. Her stomach rumbles terribly, just from the knowledge that it might be edible. She licks her dry lips, trying to pin down a thought through her dizzy head. “I—I should try it. Then. You eat if it doesn’t—”

He shakes his head. “No. We’re in this together. Whatever happens, it’s going to happen to us both.”

“Stubborn,” she chides, but it is so hard to argue about it at the moment. She can’t stop him from eating, anyway. Not right now. “Stupid.”

“Probably.” He laughs, just a little. “But. Here goes, I guess.” And he lifts the fruit to his mouth and takes a bite. Juice runs out of the corners of his mouth; he makes a gutted, stricken sound. She watches him swallow convulsively. And then he holds the fruit out to her.

She does not ask how it tastes, or if something is wrong. She just bites into it. Together. If it is poison, if this is how they die, they do it together.

Juice bursts sweet and thick across her tongue. She groans; favor is an unexpected experience after the last few days. Her stomach cramps again, and she swallows without chewing. She manages enough strength to grab his wrist, worried on a soul-deep level that he will take the food away.

He does not. He helps her eat the entirety of the fruit and then says, “We’ll eat a little more in a little while. We—we can’t eat too much, all at once.” Allura means to argue about that; she’s so hungry. But she doesn’t have the energy for it.

#

Allura feels like a living person again, the next time she wakes. Her head aches miserably and her stomach claws for attention, but she can carry a thought through to completion. Shiro offers her a fruit, and she holds it, eats it at her own pace, skin and core and all. Afterwards she licks the juice off her wrist and leans back against the stone wall. Shiro hands her another fruit; she eats it no less quickly.

“They’re pretty good,” Shiro says, finishing his own fruit. 

“Mm,” Allura agrees, swallowing the last bite. Her fingers are sticky. She considers sucking on them, but manages to restrain herself. Shiro sits across from her, his back against one of the fallen down walls. Now that her head is not so clouded, Allura can see that what remains of the building is ancient. It could be as old as she is. It looks long abandoned.

She pulls at the sleeves hanging down her arms. It takes a moment for her to process that the shirt is far, far too large for her. She looks back at Shiro, frowning. He flushes across his cheeks, shifting around and standing. “You needed it more than I did,” he says.

“You must be freezing.” Not that a single shirt would do much to alleviate the cold. Allura remembers too well the frozen bite of the rain. She hunches in on herself.

“I’m alright,” Shiro says, moving over to the nearest spot where the wall has fallen to pieces and gazing out. Sunlight streams in around him. Allura realizes she does not hear rain, or even wind. “It’s warmed up a lot, over the last few days.”

Something in Allura’s chest kicks, hard. She chokes, “Days?”

“Yeah.” Shiro does not turn to look at her, but she can see his hand grip at the wall. “It was—I’m glad you’re feeling better.” She can hear the relief in his voice, it drives her to her feet.

Her head swims and her legs feel coltish, but she stays upright. She drags her fingers along the wall, walking over to him and looking out at the strange world beyond their ramshackle shelter. “Hey,” he says, “I’m not sure you should be—”

“I’m fine. I want to stand.” She’s been completely out of it for days. He gives her a doubtful look, but relents. Forest surrounds them, light dappling down through the high branches. Leaves rustle and things move about high in the branches. Some kind of bird or insect sings out into the warm, humid air. It is beautiful, but Allura finds little to appreciate. She asks, “The others…?”

Shiro shakes his head. “They haven’t found us. And I haven’t seen any sign of anyone else here. Anyone at all.”

Allura shivers down her spine. She asks, “What have you seen?”

#

He has not seen much, as it turns out. Shiro stuck close to the collapsed homestead as she tossed and turned and burned. He found fruit-bearing trees nearby, along with a spring that flowed with cold, clear water. “The water below the cliff is still high,” he tells her, with a scowl. “I’ve been checking it every day. We were in some kind of crater, I guess. The rain is just… staying there.”

There are no other habitations, nor the remains of them, in the area immediately around them. Of other people, Shiro found no sign, though there is a plentitude of animal life; creatures both small and large roam the woods, completely without fear of the strangers in their midst. “I don’t think they’ve seen people before,” Shiro says, “and some of them are big.” He grimaces. “Very big.”

“Predators?” Allura asks. They’ve moved outside of their little shelter, where she can sit in the soft grass in a patch of sun, warming away the last of the chill hiding inside her bones. Her head feels clear enough to think of other dangers, for the first time.

“I think so. I haven’t seen anything, but something stalked me, the first day we were up here, when I went to find water. It didn’t try to follow me into the house. And I’ve found… remains.”

Allura nods. The air feels almost strange on her bare arms. Her skin seems hypersensitive. But she could not justify continuing to steal his shirt. He’d been clumsy-tongued after she removed it, his ears changing color when she thanked him for its use. She frowns at her filthy slippers; they’re not really any dirtier than her legs or the rest of her skin.

She asks, “I don’t suppose we could wash up in your spring?”

Shiro takes a moment to reply. She glances over at him and finds him staring, something unreadable in his eyes. He blinks and looks away. “Probably not. But I did find a little pool, not far from here.”

The thought of getting clean suddenly seems to be of all-encompassing importance. They might not be able to figure out where they are, or why they’re here, or where the others are, but they can, at the least, remove some of the filth from their skin. Allura stands, wobbling less already, and says, “Show me, please.”

#

Shiro’s pool was, it seems, carved from the surrounding bedrock by a waterfall pouring down from yet another cliff. The pool is deep and clear. The bottom is stone and perfectly visible, though the movement of the water makes it hard to tell how far down she’d have to swim to reach it. Water rounded the edges of the pool, making it an almost perfect circle. Water pours in from the waterfall at one side and out through a slow stream from the other.

Allura kneels down beside the pool, dragging her fingers though the water and finding it to be cool, but not freezing. She says, suddenly wanting nothing more in the world than to be clean, “I am going to wash.”

Shiro says, “Yeah?” and then clears his throat. “I mean, are you—”

“Right now,” Allura continues. “Unless there is something else that immediately needs our attention?”

“No.” Shiro’s voice is still curiously thick. Allura hopes he did not catch her sickness, though she does not know how he would resist it, after caring for her for days. “That’s—you go right ahead. I’ll be… over there. In case you need—I’ll be over there.”

Allura watches him walk off into the woods, cocking her head to the side. And then she slides into the water, shift and all; it needs washed just as badly as she does. The water nips at her skin, too chilly to really feel good, but not cold enough to hurt. She takes a breath and dips below the surface, scrubbing at her face. 

She bathes quickly and as thoroughly as she can, with no soap. When she is done, her skin tingling from the cold, she glances down at the bottom of the pool. But she does not feel quite strong enough to attempt to swim down. And anyway, it seems there will be other days to try. 

It has been days since they arrived. Surely, if the others could have found them, they would have by now…

Allura shoves that thought away and climbs out of the pool, to stand dripping on the rocks. She wrings out her hair as best she can. It is a nightmare, curls tangled into knots that she does not know how to begin addressing. The whole of it feels like one huge mat, itchy and heavy. She scowls, shoving it back and squeezing what water she can from her shift. Stains cover the white fabric, now. They’re not going to come out.

Allura picks at them for a moment and then shakes her head, smoothing the fabric as best she can. It is, at least, drying quickly. Shiro was not wrong when he said the days were growing hotter. She says, “Shiro?”

“Hey, Princess.” It sounds like he’s just beyond the tree line. “Everything alright?”

She picks her way over to him, holding her slippers in her hand. She will need to put them back on, but for the moment she enjoys being free of them. She finds him leaning against a tree, his arms crossed and his chin down. He’s frowning firmly at the ground. She says, “Your turn.”

He looks over at her, swallows, and then says, “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Water’s cold, right?”

He takes off his shirt, before entering the pool. Allura knows, because she happens to glance over. She watches the muscles in his back shift, caught off-guard, thinking about the fact that he could have left her to drown, that he carried her to safety, that he—

He looks over his shoulder, perhaps sensing her attention, and she looks hurriedly away, heat blossoming to life across her cheeks and down her throat. “Good luck,” she says, inanely, and then she ducks behind the nearest tree, her heart beating too fast in her chest.

He hesitates for a moment and then she hears him, finally, slide into the pool.

#

The days are warmer, but the nights are still cold, Allura finds, as the sun sinks down. Shiro manages to start a fire—“I found some dry wood,” he explains before arranging the sticks into a pile and doing something with his mechanical hand that creates a spark—and Allura watches the flames, enjoying the warmth they throw off. They eat more of the fruit, sitting beside one another, surrounded by the unknown and darkness.

She feels incredibly small, watching the fire slowly consume their wood, eating a fruit that leaves glittery trails behind on her skin. She swallows, fighting the way her throat tightens, and leans sideways against Shiro’s arm. 

She says nothing; she can think of nothing to say. He leans back against her, leaving the silence as it is.

Eventually, her head grows heavy and it seems impossible that she do anything but drop it to his shoulder. Her eyes shut. She is still so tired, worn thin by the cold and her long sickness. She falls asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

“Alright,” Allura says, the next morning, after they wake and drink and eat another fruit. Their fire burned down in the night, leaving behind nothing but ash. Her neck hurts from the angle she left it at during her sleep. “We need a plan.”

Shiro swallows the last bite of his sparse breakfast, nodding. “Agreed.” He keeps flexing his hand as though his entire arm fell asleep—it probably did. Her weight is not insignificant, for all that he carried her through the storm without a complaint.

“We should search the surrounding area,” Allura says, attempting to drag her fingers through her hair with limited success. She gives up after a moment, frustrated. “Even if the others are not here—” And it has been quintants, she can acknowledge, privately, that they are probably not. “—we might be able to find some way to communicate with them.”

“I think I saw some more ruins not far from here,” Shiro says. “Down in a valley.”

“Excellent. We can start there.” Having a purpose, a clear way forward, relieves some of the weight on Allura’s shoulders. 

#

The crater where they first awoke is still submerged under water. They must walk past it, to reach this valley Shiro spotted. Allura tosses a rock over the side, and the brown waters below swallow the stone. “I can’t find the path back down,” Shiro says, looking over the edge by her side. “It must have washed out. We’d have to scale the cliff to go back.”

Allura shivers. The water appears to be several feet up the trunks of the trees, well past the first branches. And it has already sunk somewhat, Shiro said. They could have drowned, both of them. “Thank you,” she says.

Shiro shakes his head, his expression pinching down tight. “Come on,” he says. “It’s this way.”

Allura sees the valley long before they reach it. The ground slopes down to it, more gently than the drop-off to the crater, but still steeply. No trees at all grow on the slope. Thick moss covers the ground, instead, and when Allura scuffs at it with her toe it reveals rock beneath, old stones fitted together near perfectly and now overgrown.

“A road?” Shiro asks, and Allura shrugs. They follow the path down to the ruins. The tumbled stones fill the valley for as far as Allura can see. Most of the walls are broken down, but they can make out paths through the skeletons of buildings. They find no bodies, nothing like that. Whatever happened to this place happened long, long ago. Everything once living has long since rotten away.

Or, perhaps, has been eaten. The hair on the back of Allura’s neck rises at different points throughout the day, her hindbrain insisting that they are being watched, stalked through the time-worn structures. She never sees the thing watching them, but the wind blows the rotten meat stench of a predator to her, over and over again. She palms one of the fallen rocks. It makes a pitiful weapon, but it is the best she has.

“Do you see it?” Shiro asks her, quietly, as though whatever is following them could hear and comprehend the words; it might be able to. Stranger things have occurred.

“No.” Allura swears she hears it, though, every now and then. Its footsteps are light, but not completely outside of the realm of hearing. There seems to be too many of them. Or there could be multiple creatures. So many predators hunt in packs.

“Right,” Shiro says, frowning and flexing his fingers. His hand has been glowing for some time, humming faintly. “Well, maybe it’ll decide we’re not worth the trouble.”

“It would not be mistaken,” Allura says, with a surety she does not really feel. They are both weakened by hunger. She has no weapon. She has no idea how strong the creatures on this planet are. They could match her. They could surpass her. 

But her words make Shiro snort and smile. She says, “We should keep looking. Just…” She frowns, trying to recall the phrase. “Just stay frosty.”

Shiro laughs outright, this time, though not loudly. It is only a huff of amused sound. She asks, stepping over another fallen wall, “Did I misuse the phrase?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head and following her. “That was fine. You’re fine.” He bumps into her, then, because she has drawn to an abrupt stop, staring forward. “Hey, what’s—oh.”

Another crater cuts through the land, a step beyond Allura’s feet. It seems to have sliced a building in half. It stretches, a hole in the middle of this ancient town, so old that it long ago filled with trees. It, too, is full of brown water. Allura steps up to the edge and looks over and then around. Buildings are sundered all the way around the sides.

“A meteor strike?” Shiro asks, kicking pebbles over the side.

“Perhaps,” Allura says, frowning. “But it looks more… surgical than that.”

“You think it was a weapon,” he says.

“I think the Galra have been terrorizing the universe for thousands of years.” She shivers. It is strange to think that the Empire has been in power for so long that their destruction has left behind ancient ruins. Allura wonders what the people of this world did to bring about this destruction. Perhaps they would have been valuable allies.

“Yeah,” Shiro says, shaking his head and turning aside. “Come on. Let’s see if there’s anything useful here.”

#

They find nothing worth their attention. Anything the people here made has been swallowed by time. All that remains are the bones of buildings and most of those are broken almost beyond recognition. They hike back to their old shelter before the day can end—neither of them wishes to stay in the dead city with the unknown predators still lingering around, not without the light of the sun.

Allura does not think the creature follows them out. Perhaps they travel beyond its territory. 

Perhaps it’s just waiting for the opportune moment to strike.

They make their fire. They eat their fruit. The temperature drops with the sun, and Allura settles beside Shiro, feeling him go still at her touch. “For warmth,” she says, though, by this point they have slept beside one another so often she is not sure the explanation is necessary.

“Oh,” he says, draping his arm over her shoulders, pulling her close. His skin feels chilly against hers. Her body temperature has finally returned to normal, settling several degrees above his. She wraps her arm over his chest, trying to share the heat with him. It is the least she can do, after everything he’s done for her. “Right.” His voice has suddenly gone hoarse. He pulls his legs up a little, crossing them in a way that looks awkward to her. “That’s—okay. Thanks.”

#

They spend the next few quintants searching their surroundings, venturing out in every direction, looking for any of the others or any technology that could allow them to make contact with the Castle. They find trees, more of the terrible craters, and, eventually, a ring of cliffs rising upward, stretching into the clouds.

“Do you think there are taller cliffs up there?” Shiro asks, standing at the foot of the stone wall, frowning.

Allura snorts. The cliff face is nearly sheer. If there is an angle to it, it is so miniscule as to be indiscernible. She sees no handholds, nothing that would offer any kind of grip. “It would not surprise me,” she says. This planet is miserable. It holds one trial after another.

Their walk back to the camp is subdued. Tiny insects take flight from the trees, glowing in a dozen different colors and filling the evening air with light. They are a new addition to the day. Allura would find them beautiful, were she not so tired.

“Listen,” Shiro says, after a while. “I think we need to… I don’t know. Fortify our camp.” He looks around the woods, and Allura wonders what he is looking for. The… presence from the ruined city lingers nearby, now. She smells it, sometimes. And there are other things, moving out in the woods. She catches glimpses of large shapes, always on the edge of her vision.

He continues, “And we should, well. We need to talk about food. Those fruits, they probably aren’t going to be in season forever. There’s only so many of them. We should probably, I don’t know, ration them. And we need to see what else we can eat. And we should probably try to figure out how to dry some of it. Or store it, somehow. If this place has a winter—”

“We should keep looking for a way to contact the others,” Allura interrupts. “And then we won’t be here in the winter. If there is a winter.”

“Princess, wait,” he says, catching her arm. She had not realized she was moving so quickly. She slows. Her heart races uncomfortably under her ribs. He looks down at her, softly, “I want to believe there’s some way to contact them here, too. But—”

She jerks her arm out of his grip. “There’s a way. We just haven’t found it. We just have to keep looking, to keep focused on what’s important.”

“Not starving to death, freezing to death, or getting mauled to death by whatever that is out there are all pretty important to me,” he says back, dry and sharp. It’s too hot. Allura knows that the temperature, the hunger, and the steady bite of exhaustion are all conspiring together to stoke her temper; his as well, most likely.

Knowing the cause of her frustration makes it no easier for her to bank down the flare of her anger. She snaps, “We have a responsibility to get out of here. A duty to the universe.”

He shakes his head. “We’re not going to be able to do anything for anyone if we’re dead.”

“We’ve survived so far.” Despite everything this hellacious place has thrown at them, they have survived. They just have to keep looking. There must be something, somewhere that will get them off this forsaken planet. They just need to find it. And then they can get back to the others. 

“Barely!” Shiro snaps, taking a sharp step towards her. His hands flex by his sides. “You almost—I thought you were going to—I thought I lost—Allura,” he strangles off, as though her name is argument enough, as though he is trying to fit an entire explanation into it. His expression is fierce and terrible, before he turns to the side, rubbing a hand up over his face.

He breathes so hard his shoulders shake.

Her anger drains, leaving her suddenly aware that they are close to screaming at one another in the middle of a strange forest, with terrible creatures ever just out of visual range. She takes a deep breath and blows it out, uncrossing her arms and tugging at her tangled hair. She says, to Shiro’s heaving shoulders, “I have… I have sat out so much of this war. I cannot—every day I spend here is another day I shirk my duties. No one else can pilot the Castle. I need to be there. I need—” Her words fail her. Her eyes burn and she blinks rapidly, trying to will away the tears before they can form.

“Hey, hey, I know,” Shiro says. He catches her hand before she can tug more forcefully at one of the knots in her hair. His fingers are warm and strong, large. “I get it. I should be out there, too. But we can’t get off this rock for the time being, so we need to make sure we stay alive long enough to figure out how.”

She stares up at him, the pressure still sitting in the back of her throat, tightened by the weight of her failures. She says, “Alright. Fair enough.”

“Alright,” he repeats, squeezing her hand, managing a small smile. “We are going to get off this rock. I promise.” She cannot seem to look away from his eyes. His hand around hers is so warm. She wants to believe him so badly. She wants to… He glances down and says, quietly, “Allura.” She shivers when he leans a little closer, and—

And something huge crashes through the forest, somewhere off to their right. Shiro’s grip tightens; he pulls her closer, even as she says, “We should return to camp.”

“Good idea,” he says, and they move off with all speed.

Whatever lurks in the woods does not pursue them. Allura does not realize that she still holds his hand until they get back to their shelter and he lets go to see to their fire. She stares down at her hand for a moment, shivering, and then shakes her head and goes to find a fruit for dinner.

#

The next morning they set about fortifying their camp. It is not a process either of them are familiar with. “This isn’t the kind of engineering they taught in the Garrison,” Shiro says, ruefully, as they take a brief break from discussing what they can possibly do to improve their living quarters.

“What is this Garrison?” Allura asks, pacing a perimeter around the fallen house. She has an idea for defenses, but she is not sure it will work. “I have heard you and the others discuss it.” They’d never had the time for her to question his past, before.

“Oh,” Shiro says, continuing to move the stones tumbled everywhere to one neat pile, “it was where I worked. Back on Earth. I went to school there, too. It was an organization focused on exploring the solar system and, I guess, eventually the galaxy.”

“Exploration is a noble goal.” Allura looks down at the path she made with her footsteps and then out at the surrounding trees. 

“I guess,” Shiro says, and something in his voice makes her look over at him. He has not faltered in his work, but he’s frowning now. His eye are distant. Seeing something else. Remembering. She makes a soft, questioning sound, and he shakes his head. “It’s not—the Galra found me. When I was on an exploratory mission for the Garrison.”

Allura winces and says, “Oh.” The results of that capture are written all over his body. She’s grown familiar with the scars carved into his skin—it’s been too hot for him to wear his shirt for days. The bands of scar around his lost arm are the thickest, but there are so many others, marks from blades, claws, and teeth. From a whip, overlaid across his shoulders.

“Yeah,” he says, barking a soft laugh. “And when I escaped, when I got back to Earth, they…” He pauses, his frown growing deeper. He stops moving and his jaw works, soundlessly, for a moment, before he masters his voice with a clear exertion of will. “They strapped me down,” he repeats, almost incredulously, before his voice breaks. “They—I tried to warn them and they—they strapped me down, they strapped—”

Allura crosses to him and touches his shoulder, and he flinches, breathing so raggedly that his shoulders shake. Allura winces, making to move away, to give him some space, and he reaches out lightning-fast, grabbing her wrist. He does not even look before he does it. His fingers squeeze tight, to the point of discomfort. 

“That’s over,” she tells him, quietly, feeling the tremble in his fingers as he holds her. “That will not happen again. I will never allow that to happen again.”

He takes a steadier breath, nodding and pressing the back of his wrist to his mouth for a moment. She watches him re-order his expression, tucking away the fear that momentarily roamed free across his face. He glances at her out of the corner of his eyes, after a moment, and flashes her an abashed smile. “Sorry,” he says, “I know that’s not, I know that’s over, I just….”

“I understand,” she says. There are times that she forgets that the past is over, as well. “You do not need to apologize.” She does not want him to ever apologize for what he had to go through, but she does not know how to say that, not without her tongue tangling into knots. She knows not to speak unless she can speak clearly and precisely. “They should not have done that to you.”

That self-depreciating smile falls from his mouth. He glances down to where he still holds her wrist and strokes his thumb over her skin. And then he clears his throat, and takes a quick step back, releasing her. “I—thank you,” he says. “That’s…” He looks around, color creeping up the sides of his neck. “We should get this finished.”

“Yes,” she says, confused by the sudden distance. “I actually have an idea. Do you think you can cut through a tree trunk?”

#

As it turns out, Shiro’s mechanical hand can easily slice through the trunk of a tree. Removing the branches proves to be no problem for him, either. He works on felling the huge trees, and Allura lifts them afterwards, carrying them away and stacking them neatly beside their camp. She catches Shiro staring at her, once, as she lifts a trunks, and asks, “What?”

“Nothing,” he says, too quickly, looking away. His ears turn red.

Allura considers pursuing it, but they have a lot of work to do before they run out of sun or energy, so she does not press the issue.

Allura calculates how much wood they will need on another trip back to the camp—they had to move further out into the surrounding forest to find trees that suit their purpose—haphazard plans for their shelter running through her head when a chill steals up her back. She pauses, cocking her head to the side, not sure what caught her attention. The forest is quiet for once, and—

And the forest is quiet for once. Strangely, absurdly quiet, in a way it has not been since they arrived. Allura turns, the log still balanced upon her shoulder, scanning the woods, sure she is about to be set upon by one of the predators that stalk them. She will throw the log at it, and then—

And from behind her, she hears a startled cry, abruptly cut off. 

“Shiro!” Allura drops the log without thought, pivoting on her toe and charging back through the forest. Why had she left him alone? Why had they split up? It would have taken longer for him to accompany her back to their camp with each log, but what did they have to rush for? They knew something lurked in the woods. She knew. 

If anything happens to him, if she is too late, she has no way to treat him. No way to tend a wound. Any injury could become infected and—and there would be so little they could do. And that assumes that he survives. That assumes that he will not be dead when she arrives. That she will not be left here, totally alone, at fault for his loss, because she did not think the situation through, because she underestimated the risk, because—

Something crashes through a tree up ahead, after being thrown through the air. The thing is large, easily twice Allura’s height and perhaps five times her size. It is covered in thick, matted fur that is moss green and brown in color. It reeks of rotted meat, the smell radiating off of it and out of its wide slash of a mouth, full of teeth designed to puncture and rend.

It lunges forward, and Allura can see the purple glow of Shiro’s hand. He does not scream or cry out in pain. Perhaps she is in time. She holds onto that thought, charging forward, thinking of nothing beyond removing the beast from his person. She puts her shoulder down and snarls, slamming into the side of the beast and throwing it aside.

“Allura?” Shiro pants from where he crouches by her feet. There’s blood on his chest and shoulder, blindingly red. Across from them, the creature shakes its massive head and gathers itself. It has no eyes that Allura can see, though its head does seem to be covered in some kind of antennae. They all stand on end, surrounding a mouth like a plate of broken glass. Salvia drips from between the jagged teeth.

Allura’s hands itch for a weapon. She steps in front of Shiro, barely hearing his answering noise of alarm. She is stronger than he is, outside of the Lions. If they must grapple, hand to claw, with some terrible beast, her strength must be taken into consideration. It is her duty to protect him. To protect all of the Paladins.

The beast chuffs, making a low barking sound, and then it coils, energy mustering in its hindquarters as it prepares to leap. Allura braces for the impact, and cries out when Shiro grabs her by the waist and yanks her to the side, out of the path of a second onrushing beast she had not even seen.

The animal lands in a pounce directly where Allura had stood. It snarls over at them, right there, unavoidable, and Allura slugs it across the ugly face, snarling back. It’s fur feels over-hot against her knuckles. The hair is coarse and grimy. Something cracks from the force of the blow, but there is no time to enjoy that. 

The other beast closes on them, taking advantage of their distraction, and there is another rush of movement from their backs, as a third beast joins the fray. They must hunt in packs, these monsters. They, at least, seem to understand the importance of sticking together.

Allura will have to berate herself later. There is no time for it, then. The three beasts snap and claw and lunge. Shiro remains at her back, protecting her as she protects him. It is a scramble to avoid crushing jaws, to land desperate blows of their own. Allura’s breath comes hot and strangled as she grabs a branch off of the ground; it is not much of a weapon, but it will do.

And it does. One of the creatures snaps at her, and Allura smacks it across the jaw with the branch, so hard that the wood pulverizes in her hand, so hard that it stuns the beast momentarily. That is all the time she needs to draw back a fist and slam it down, hard, into the space in the middle of the beast’s head.

There is a crunch. Something gives. And the beast goes limp, all at once, just dropping by her feet, where it lays in a steaming, stinking pile.

Allura sucks in a breath, her heart beating at her ribs so hard she fears the bones will shatter. Dead. It’s dead. She killed it. She—

The other two creatures roar, suddenly. The sound splits the air, terrible and so low that it vibrates the organs inside Allura’s gut. There is some kind of animal grief and fury in the noise, something that makes the hair on Allura’s arms stand up straight.

The animals redouble their attacks. It is all Allura can do to avoid being bitten or driven to the ground. Shiro curses, going down beneath the bulk of one of the creatures. Allura cries out, the sound torn from her throat, and a tick later there is a burst of purple as Shiro shoves his hand out of the back of the creature’s neck.

It collapses on top of him, and Allura’s first instinct is to toss it aside. But the final creature is on her. She has no time to avoid it, to dive to one side or the other. She shrinks, instead, changing her size to get below the creature’s maw. It charges past her, trying to check it’s speed even as she re-stretches her bones and muscles. It pivots, mouth exhaling a stinking wash of breath across Allura’s face, and she hits it, once, twice, thrice.

The ground jumps a little when the beast hits it.

Allura sucks in a breath, stumbling a step away from the body. Her thoughts are nothing but tangling noise. She feels hyperaware of the air on her skin and the stink of death. She shakes her head, swallowing a sudden flood of bile up the back of her throat, she needs to—

“Allura?” Shiro asks, in the same instant that he touches her arm. Allura jumps, and he continues, “It’s just me. Are you—are you okay?”

Allura blinks over and up at him. There is a smear of wet red over his throat and chest and stomach. His arms are covered in it. Allura does not recall moving, but in the next moment she is in front of him, running her hands over his skin, looking for the wound, the injury spilling all this blood.

“Allura,” he says, again, louder, grabbing at her wrists, though he can only hold on as she moves her hands around, he cannot keep her still. “Allura, stop, I’m—it isn’t mine. It’s not mine. I’m fine.”

He does not sound hurt. Allura looks back up at him, and sees nothing but concern in his eyes. There’s no pain. He’s fine. He’s alive. She lets out a breath and realizes she is light-headed. Her hands are pressed against his sides. She can feel his ribs expanding with each fast breath. He’s still gripping her wrists.

“You’re fine,” she says, just to make sure. It does not feel quite real yet. Nothing feels quite real, in that moment. She feels like she will wake up, if she just focuses on shaking free of this bizarre, terrible dream. She concentrates, and for a moment she feels like the world turns upside down. There is a flash of light, and—

And Shiro smiles at her, lopsidedly. “Yes,” he says, and she forgets her mad thoughts about dreaming.

“Thank the gods,” she says, swaying forward and wrapping her arms around him, quickly. She does not care that he is covered with the creatures’ blood. It matters little. She holds him. “I thought I was going to be too late. I thought—” She’d thought he was going to die. She’d thought she was going to be alone here. All alone. It is… too terrible a thought to give voice.

“I know,” Shiro says, his voice quiet and thick. He settles his arms around her, after a moment. She did not even think about the fact that they are not in the habit of embracing. They have been sharing body heat for so long now. And she… needed to feel the solidness of his body, to feel him breathing, to know that he was really alright. “I get it.”

She laughs, a little. Her cheek presses against his collarbone. She says, “We are not going to split up again.”

Shiro tightens his grip, just a little. He says, roughly, “I was about to say the same thing.”

Allura nods and makes herself draw back. The embrace has already stretched… for some time. She clears her throat, looking down at the bodies around them, so she does not have to face Shiro’s expression. She nudges the nearest animal with her toe, and asks, to distract her thoughts from how pleasant his embrace had been, “What are we going to do with them?”

#

They take the bodies back to camp.

It seems the most sensible thing to do.

They end up with three huge carcasses beside their pile of logs. They stand beside one another, looking the beasts over, and Shiro says, “We could… try to eat them, I guess.” Allura’s stomach rumbles at the thought. They are not getting enough to eat. They have not since they arrived, however necessary the rationing of the fruit has been. Her hunger is a constant presence, lurking ever over her shoulder and grinding rocks around in her gut to ensure she remembers it.

She swallows the flood of saliva into her mouth. “We could,” she agrees. “And we could use their pelts, perhaps? If they can be cleaned.” It would be nice to have something besides the ground to lie on, though she would not want to use the furs in their current state. She still might. They’ve adjusted to a lot, in their time on the planet.

“Yeah,” Shiro says, taking a bracing breath. “Okay. Well. I guess we should just… I mean. Do you have any idea how we should… do any of this?”

Allura laughs, the sound startled from her throat. “No,” she says, mastering herself and pressing the back of her wrist to her mouth. “None.”

Shiro reaches out and touches her shoulder. “Me either. We’ll figure it out together.”

#

In the end, it could be worse. Shiro uses his hand to do most of the skinning, as they have no knives or other sharp objects. They separate the creatures into pieces, a strange series of actions that leaves Allura with a queasy feeling in the bottom of her stomach that refuses to fade all the way. “I wish we had salt,” Shiro says, apropos of nothing, in the middle of a flurry of wet cracking sounds. 

Allura looks up from frowning over the skins and hums, “Hm?”

He is bloody to his elbows. They are both filthy. Allura holds the promise of bathing inside her heart, looking forward to it immensely. Shiro sighs. “To preserve some of this. Not that I’d know what to do with it. But I know you use it… somehow.” He grimaces.

“That seems complicated,” Allura says, dropping the fur and rubbing her hands against her shift, though that stands no chance of actually cleaning anything off. 

“It probably is,” Shiro says, reaching into the body with a wet, squelching sound. “But what’s the alternative?”

Allura looks down at the piles of meat set out around them, filling the air with an unpleasant stink that is nevertheless making her salivate. She says, shrugging, “Magic.”

Shiro pauses in his work, rocking back on his heels and staring at her. He asks, “What?”

#

“My grandmother taught me these spells,” Allura says, frowning in concentration. She is tired and hungry and far from the ideal state of mind to attempt a magical working. But she has done more in worse situations. She draws on the memory of her grandmother’s small hands and crinkled eyes, gathering power between her fingers.

Quintessence shimmers over her skin for an instant and she directs it down into the chunk of meat currently serving as her focus. A moment later the spell fades, leaving behind something that looks a bit like a rock. She can see the striations of muscle within it. It looks… mostly like what she believes it should.

Shiro lifts it, turning it from side to side. He asks, “And this’ll last?”

Allura shrugs. “I believe so.” She has no idea, really. Her grandmother said it would, but that is all the proof Allura has. If Allura remembers correctly, they are to boil it when they want to eat it.

“Well, alright then.” Shiro frowns back over at their work. “We should probably make sure it’s even edible, before you do any more of it.”

#

The meat smells amazing while cooking. Allura holds her piece over the open flame of their campfire with a stick, ignoring the rumbling in her gut as best she can. It browns and drips sizzling grease down onto the flames. She has to keep swallowing, her mouth almost unpleasantly full of salvia. “Close enough,” Shiro says, finally, pulling his piece back and blowing on it hurriedly before taking a bite.

He does not immediately scream or cry out in disgust. That’s really all of the reassurance that Allura needs. She follows his lead, and barely feels the heat of the food against her tongue, though it burns. She chews perhaps once, maybe twice, and swallows. She means to go slowly, but her entire piece is gone in ticks.

Shiro says, sounding a little abashed, “Well. Now I guess we wait to see if that kills us or not.”

#

It does not. They live, even after eating more of the meat, until Allura’s stomach stops rumbling and aching for the first time since they arrived. It’s been so long since they ate a satisfying amount of food that it feels strange to be full.

The energy from the meal allows her to preserve the rest of the meat, leaving them with the skins and the bones. Allura focuses on trying to adapt her spell to somehow deal with the skins while Shiro runs his hand over the bones, burning away any remnants of sinew or flesh. “We could make things out of them,” he says, when Allura arches an eyebrow in question. “Weapons, maybe. I don’t know. I have some ideas.”

Allura nods. She trusts him. She trusts him and she almost lost him and—and it is better to not think about that. She shakes her head, refocusing on the skins. The work takes them the entirety of the day; the sun sinks below the horizon before they finish, and even then, the skins still stink. Allura thinks they will wash clean, though. They are free from any excess… organic bits. She thinks they will work.

Finishing them will be work for a different day.

“We should get cleaned up,” she says, setting aside the last of the skins. She grimaces down at her tacky hands and the filth that covers her from shoulders to feet. 

“I’m not going to argue with that,” Shiro says. He is every bit as dirty as she is, if not more. It is hard to remember that they began the day chopping down trees. They are both quiet traveling to their bathing pool. “You can go first,” Shiro says, after they arrive. “I’ll just—”

Allura grabs his arm when he makes to step back towards the woods, without thought or intention. Last time they were separated a pack of monsters attacked him. “Don’t,” she says, tightening her grip. “Don’t go. Stay here.”

“Allura,” he says, his voice suddenly strained. “I don’t know if that’s—”

“It’s dangerous here,” she interrupts, her heart already racing uncomfortably fast. “We must stay together. Who knows how many more of those creatures there are.”

For a moment, he says nothing. She watches him swallow hard. And then he nods. “Right,” he says, and then he clears his throat. “Right, you’re right. We’ll just. Stay together. That’s. Okay.”

Allura nods, releasing his arm now that she is sure he will not disappear into the dark trees, beyond the area where she can keep him safe. His presence poses a few issues, but she will happily deal with them if it means they can remain close by one another. She picks at her shift and decides to leave it on after cutting a look towards Shiro and feeling her cheeks heat.

She slides into the water, hoping that its chill will steal some of the heat from her skin.

“Right,” Shiro repeats, again, climbing into the other side of the pool. They do not speak. Allura decides it is wisest to keep her back to him, in any case, though her ears pick up every splash of water, every movement he makes. She scrubs at her skin and her shift, which will never be the same. Her hair is nothing but a frustration at this point and she growls, trying to at least clean the majority of the filth from it.

“What is it?” Shiro asks. “Everything alright?”

“Yes,” Allura says, and then snorts a laugh. Very little in their lives is alright at this point, but she understands that is not what he is asking her. “My hair is just… A mess. It is a foolish thing to worry about.” 

“Can I help?” Allura is surprised enough by the offer that she turns and finds Shiro already watching her. He looks hurriedly away. The faint light from the stars through the clouds reflects off of his skin and the surface of the water, hiding everything below the surface. 

Allura clears her throat. “Not unless you can cut the entire knotted tangle off,” she says, because she has resigned herself to that. She can see no other solution. She has tried picking the knots out with her fingers and it gets her nowhere but frustrated. And they have so many more important things to worry about. Like the injury that she can see on his upper arm, visible now that all the dried filth is washed away. She frowns, kicking over towards him. 

His eyes go huge. He chokes, “Allura?” She grabs the bank beside him, reaching for the wound with her other hand.

She asks, “Why did you not tell me you were hurt?”

“I—what?” He looks down and blinks. “Oh, it’s, that’s nothing.”

The wound is longer than her hand and not shallow. It is bleeding, either still or again. Allura frowns up at him. “It is not nothing.”

He shrugs, moving her hand up and down. His smile is a small thing, rueful. He says, “I’ve had worse.” She knows; she has grown well familiar with the scars littered over his body. “It’s not going to kill me and we had other things to take care of.”

He is not wrong, but Allura still dislikes the injury and the fact that they ignored it for so long. She says, “I will take care of it when we get back to camp. Are you finished?” The water is cold and only growing colder. Shiro nods, and Allura climbs from the water, looking back at him with sharp concern when he makes a strange, strangled sound. “Are you alright?”

Shiro nods and then ducks under the water for a moment. By the time he climbs from the pool, there’s a tinge of blue to his skin. Allura shivers all the way back to their camp. “What I wouldn’t give for a towel,” Shiro says, and Allura snorts, nodding.

“Alright,” Allura says, nudging him towards their shrunken fire, once they have reached their shelter. “Build that back up and sit.” She does not know entirely what to do about the wound on his arm. They have no bandages. No medicine. But it is still bleeding, painting his arm red. She is afraid that the smell of the injury will draw other predators. 

Allura sighs, looking down at her shift. It is still, mostly, in one piece, though it is far from white now. She bends as Shiro feeds another log onto the fire, tearing at the hem until she has two long strips of fabric. “What are you doing?” Shiro asks her, staring at her when she glances up at him.

“Tending your arm,” she says, straightening. The shift still falls below her knees. She folds one of the strips up, moving to kneel beside him. “Hold still.”

Gooseflesh rises across his skin when she presses the makeshift bandage into place. His hand flexes on his leg. Allura swallows, focusing on the task at hand. She wraps the other piece of cloth around his arm and ties it into place. “There,” she says. “Finished.”

She settles beside him on the section of stone they arranged around the fire. The cold from their bath has not left her skin. She leans into him, looking for some warmth and offering just as much in return. He curls his arm around her, and she rests her head on his shoulder, her eyes growing heavier by the moment.

She imagines, before she falls asleep, that he presses a kiss to the top of her head.

#

The next few days are dedicated to digging a ditch around their camp and piling all of the dirt along the inside of the circle. Between her strength and his hand, they have little trouble with the work or with any roots and rocks that bar their way. Afterwards, they lower the tree trunks point-down into the ditch, Allura shoving them into the dirt as they wall themselves in. They pack the earth around their barricade; Shiro sharpens the tops of all the trunks, once that work is completed. It leaves them with a wall that is close to thirty-feet high. They leave a small section that can be removed easily enough, when they need to leave. 

“Well, unless something out there can fly, this should at least slow any attackers down,” Shiro says, brushing off his hands and gazing up at their work. His arm healed without a problem, relieving a deep, dark anxiety in Allura’s chest. He twisted the pieces of fabric from her shift together, once he no longer needed them, and wears them tied around his wrist. Allura is not sure why. She has not been able to find the words to ask for them back. What would she use them for?

“I hope so,” Allura says. She does not like thinking about their last run-in with the planet’s predatory species. “Now what?”

#

They rebuild the walls of the house using the remnants of tumbled stone. They clean the skins and use them to cover the floor where they sleep. They sacrifice another few trees to make something like a roof. It is not pretty and the entire enterprise leans to one side, but it withstands the next storm that strikes, one that brings heavy rains and flashes of lightning, raging for nearly an entire day, trapping them indoors.

Allura stands at their doorway, watching the gray sheets of the rain and the strange lightning that dances mostly across the clouds, only rarely grounding itself down into the earth. “Hey,” Shiro says, eventually, leaning against the wall and offering something out. Allura blinks down at what appears to be a piece of the skull from one the beasts they killed. It has been carefully shaped to have fat, smooth tines.

A comb.

She reaches out and takes it, slowly. The bone is smooth, carefully shaped. She saw him working on it, during the moments when they simply ran out of the energy to focus on larger projects. She had not anticipated what he created.

“I don’t know if it’ll work,” he says, scrubbing at the back of his neck. “But I thought—I know your hair is bothering you. If you want, I can try to help you with it.”

Allura keeps staring at the comb. She runs her fingers along the teeth and finds them to be completely smooth, free of any barbs or hooks that would catch on the knots within her hair. “You did not have to do this,” she says, finally, looking up at him. “You don’t have to help me.”

He is already looking at her. He always seems to be. There isn’t much else to see, inside their camp. He wears a small smile. “I wanted to,” he says, barely audible over the rain. “I want to.”

“Well,” Allura says, trying to tamp down the fluttering in her stomach—he is only being kind, after all. She can barely manage to look at him. “Then I would appreciate your aid.” She holds out the comb, and he takes it back, his fingers brushing hers, sending tingles up her arm.

She swallows, ignoring the hum of her pulse and settling near the fire, so that he will have light to see all the knots. He sits behind her. She feels the hesitant touch of his hand against her hair. Her back and shoulders feel hyper-sensitive. She keeps forgetting how to breathe. “Tell me if I hurt you,” he says.

Allura replies, without thinking, “You won’t.”

His fingers curl into her hair and then he goes still for a moment. She imagines she hears him swallow, but that is foolish. She sinks her teeth into her bottom lip, in an attempt to hold any other comments back. After a moment he exhales and moves once more, running his hand down her hair, to the tangled ends.

He starts there, as though he has some experience unknotting long hair. He works slowly and carefully, teasing out the tangles with the comb of bone. She shivers when he finishes, brushing her hair off of one shoulder with the tips of his fingers. He pauses, asking, “Okay?”

She clears her throat and says, “Yes. It’s—yes. It is more than ‘okay.’” 

He sucks in a little breath. She wishes she could see his expression, and then she can, because he touches her shoulder and turns her. His eyes are dark. His hand brushes her jaw. And she thinks he will—

Lightning crashes, so close by that the air itself splits with sound and blinding white light pours momentarily into their home. Allura jumps, and in the aftermath they both laugh, the moment, whatever it was, broken. Allura runs a hand over her hair—it feels lighter, though, of course, it is not—and then pulls it up, tying it back with one of the tendons they dried. She says, “Thank you, Shiro.”

He tucks a strand she missed behind her ear and says, “It was no problem.” And then he clears his throat and looks hurriedly away. “I should… see to the fire.”

“Right,” Allura says, watching him walk away, to poke at their sole source of warmth. His shoulders are so broad. His hair, growing out, brushes across the nape of his neck. She thinks of his fingers trailing across her shoulder and shivers, swallowing hard. “Of course.”

#

“Do you think they’re still alive?” Allura asks, one evening when they are sitting out beneath the stars. They spent the day hunting and gathering food stores. They are covering the walls and the roof with more skins, to keep out the incessant rain. The pinpricks of light above them are barely visible, ever obscured by the clouds. She has never been able to get an exact idea of their location, no matter how many nights she tries. And it has been so many nights, she thinks. Too many.

They have been trapped on the planet for an eternity. She has lost track of the exact amount of time. Her sickness made sure of that.

Shiro turns to look at her, twisting a piece of grass between his fingers. The inky strands of his hair, growing steadily, fall and blend with his beard. He says, settling his shoulders uncomfortably, “What?”

“The others,” she clarifies, looking back up to the sky. She looks for the moving streak of light that might be the Castle out of habit. “Do you think… do you think they won? Do you think they lived?”

These are the thoughts she usually buries in her nightmares. They have gained enough weight to tumble out of her head and into her mouth. 

“I…” Shiro blows out a breath, scrubbing at the back of his neck. “I want to think so.”

Allura closes her eyes, her face upturned to the sky. She had not expected him to give voice to her emotions so clearly. Perhaps she should have. Like her, he feels responsible for the others. It is… hard to imagine them winning, even surviving on their own. They were so young. Her eyes burn.

She says, her voice thick, “I suppose we will never know. Not for sure.”

Shiro makes a soft, gutted noise. He says, “Allura.”

“They would have found us,” she says, keeping her eyes shut. It is easier to speak that way. The words come more freely. “If they could have. They would have come. The Castle… they would not have been able to open wormholes.” Her throat tightens terribly. “They would not have been able to form Voltron. Not unless they found another pilot. If the Galra attacked—”

“Allura!” Shiro repeats, his voice no louder, but so urgent. He grabs her shoulders, but does not shake her. He pleads, “Stop.”

“I left them,” she says, instead, the words beating their way out from behind her teeth, determined to be spoken. “I left them, I left the whole universe, again. They needed me, and I left. I left them to face something I should have taken care of, I left—”

“Look at me,” Shiro snaps, interrupting the terrible stream of her words. A tick later he adds, softer, “Please.”

She cracks her eyes open. She looks at him. His eyes are dark. His mouth is thin behind his beard. The starlight, what weak echo of it makes it through the clouds, shines on his skin. “You didn’t leave anyone,” he says, his hands warm on her shoulders. She knows even his calluses, now. She’s grown so familiar with him. She shakes her head, and he says, “You were taken, Allura, that’s not—”

“The result is the same,” she says, because she does not want to hear the excuses. “I should be out there, fighting Zarkon. For ten thousand years, I should have been out there. How many lives were snuffed out while I slept, Shiro? How many worlds have been destroyed in the time I spent on this planet? How many of our friends have fallen, because—”

She does not expect the hot rush of tears. Her words strangle off and she turns her face to the side, wiping at her eyes. Tears do no one any good. They are one more pointless action.

“It’s not your fault,” Shiro says, shifting closer. He brushes his thumb over her cheek. 

She asks, “Does it matter whose fault it is? Does that change anything?” She laughs joylessly. The world goes blurry and unfocused, from her tears, perhaps. She feels, for a moment, as though she is floating. The sensation is strange. Unpleasant. She tries to shake it away. “I have failed everyone. My family. My friends. My people.”

“No,” Shiro says, cupping her cheek and ducking down, catching her eye. “No. You haven’t failed anyone. Not as long as you’re still alive. As long as we’re alive, there’s a chance we can get out of here. There’s a chance we can get back into the fight. We just have to stay alive, Allura. That’s all. We just have to keep going. We have to be here, when they come for us.”

Allura looks at him through the sting of her tears. She grabs his arm and holds on, anchoring herself to him, because she feels that if she does not she will be swept away. Her body feels strange. For a moment the world is terribly bright. She blinks and asks, “Do you really think they’re coming?”

His eyes narrow. He swallows hard. And then he nods. “Yeah—yes. I do. We didn’t live through all of this to be forgotten. We’ve made it this far. We just have to keep going, and they will find us. And we’ll get back out there. And we’ll do what we have to do.”

She stares at him. In that moment, it is easy to believe him. His words sweep her up, and she wants to believe. She needs to believe. She swallows and nods, tightening her grip on him. “Yes,” she says, “of course we will.”

He marshals a smile for her and wipes at her cheeks, his fingers coming to curl at her jaw. His gaze slips down, and the dizziness in her head is not enough to do away with the clench of want in her stomach. But he clears his throat, then, instead of leaning closer, and moves hurriedly back. They were so very close. She watches him go, loss pounding behind her ribs. She looks back up at the clouds, until her heartrate slows down and the last remnants of dizziness fade away.

#

And time passes, unstoppable, until one evening Allura wakes in the night.

She knows why immediately. She had grown so used to the press of Shiro’s body by her own. Even as the days have grown so warm, the nights remain so chilly. And there is safety and comfort, in knowing that he slumbers right beside her. He is not beside her now. He is not even in their home. The light of the fire reveals that much. Allura sits up, her heart kicking at her ribs, and calls, “Shiro?” 

She is already on her feet and to the door by the time he says, “Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

He stands outside of their shelter, staring up at the sky. It is full of colors, of ribbons of blue and purple that dance and twine around one another, filling the sky from end to end. They reflect off of his skin. His arms and shoulders are covered with goosebumps. Allura touches his arm, following his gaze upwards, and asks, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing new,” he says and sighs, rubbing at the back of his neck. She waits, and after a moment he continues, “I—it was just a nightmare. I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

“You didn’t,” she says, moving a little closer to him. The air is nippier outside of their shelter. He makes a soft sound, almost a scoff, and Allura nudges him. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He shakes his head, shuddering. “No. No, I really don’t.”

Allura nods. She almost leaves it. But… but she wants to help him. He helps her. They help one another. She says, looking up at the dancing aurora, “Sometimes it helps. Or so I have been told.”

He is quiet for so long that she thinks he will just not answer, but then he draws a shaky breath and speaks, “It was—it’s an old nightmare. I’ve been having it since I… escaped.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, leaning her head against his shoulder and placing her hand on his chest. It is a gesture of comfort she saw her mother offer her father so many times. It is… intimate. She had not thought before she did it, and now there seems to be no easy way to undo it. She can feel his heart beating against her palm. He sucks in a sharp little breath.

“Allura, I…” he says, staring down at her hand. Allura shivers and pats him, trying to turn the gesture into something more acceptable, and he reaches up, curling his hand around hers, pushing her palm, gently, back against his skin. 

She looks up at him, a rush of heat and electricity speeding down her spine. He meets her gaze, and her breath catches as the knowledge of how to inhale flees from her. The aurora shines behind his head. A cold wind blows across her skin, but she barely even feels it. She sways a little closer to him.

He leans down, and then stops, abruptly, his mouth a shiver away from hers. She can feel his breath. They stand there, so close, and yet, as Allura is suddenly aware, not quite close enough. Her tongue darts out, wetting her bottom lip. She is close enough to see his eyes darken as he tracks the movement.

And then he closes the last of the distance between them, and, for a moment, everything else in the universe goes away, including Allura’s jumbled thoughts. He shifts, his fingers threading into her hair. The kiss is soft, gentle. Allura exhales shakily against his mouth, the foundations that hold her heart quaking.

He leans back, after a moment, an eternity. Her skin feels cold, even with the minimal distance between their bodies. He says, drawing his hand away, “I’m sorry.”

Allura stares at him, all of her thoughts flying away at thousands of miles per hour, each in a different direction. She can feel her pulse against the inside of her skin. Her lips tingle. She asks, because it is the only thing she can think to do, “Why?”

His ears turn red. He shifts his weight. His voice is hoarse when he says, “I shouldn’t have—I should have asked. Before I—I know you don’t—”

“Yes,” Allura says, because she—she did not anticipate this. Her mind has ever been too busy to even consider, but now that she is, now that he has kissed her, all she can think is how much she would like him to kiss her once more. 

He blinks, opening and closing his mouth once before managing to ask, “What?”

“If you worry you should have asked if I wished you to kiss me,” she says, the explanation feeling as though it comes from someone far away, “my answer is and would have been ‘yes.’”

Shiro stares at her, and then something in his expression changes. His entire bearing re-adjusts. His gaze drops to her mouth and he shifts closer. He asks, strangely audible over the pounding thump of her heart, “You’re sure?”

She cannot bear to speak of it any longer. She touches his cheek and pushes up onto her toes, kissing him in a way that she hopes conveys her emotions. It must, because he groans against her mouth, cradling the back of her head, meeting and matching the desperation in her kiss. His beard is strange against her skin, but his lips are so soft. His body is warm, his hand broad when he spreads his fingers across her lower back, drawing her close, holding her tight.

They kiss until she shivers, hard, and pulls back, just a little. Her hand is still pressed against his chest. She can feel how fast his heart is beating. It sends a thrum of heat up from her feet, a pulse of need that must be answered.

She fits her other hand into his, threading their fingers together as he watches, his eyes dark, his mouth shiny. She takes a step backwards, towards their shelter, and she does not have to tug him along. He follows her through the door, across the well-worn floor, to the bed they have made for themselves.

The fire still burns to one side. The dancing flames cast alternating patterns of shadow and light across his skin as they stand there, on the furs. She chases one shadow with her fingers, and he drags in a sharp breath, catching her hand. His voice is some low, rough thing when he asks, “What—what do you want?”

She looks at him, the ragged beard he wears, striped with white, the scars carved into his skin, the muscle and flesh stretched over bone, stark from the hunger that never quite goes away. She looks into his eyes, watching her, always watching her, and shivers. “You,” she says, because everything has been stripped away from them but the truth, “I want—”

He kisses her before she can repeat her desires. He pulls her close, and she marvels at the way they fit against one another, she marvels at the careful curl of his hand around the back of her head when they stretch across the furs, she marvels at the way he pants her name, desperate, she marvels at the movement of their bodies, and the way he kisses her, afterwards, like it is the only thing he wants to do in the world.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey so, writer's block is a miserable experience, but look, I finally finished the scene holding this up and it's all done now. So. Yay?

Allura wakes up beside Shiro. That is hardly of note on its own; they have been sleeping huddled together for phoebs now, sharing warmth and comfort. But never quite as they did the night before. She shifts, memory heating her cheeks and speeding her pulse, and Shiro makes a questioning sound against the back of her neck.

His bare arm rests over her bare waist. His prickling beard tickles against her skin. He murmurs, “Allura?”

“Mm,” she replies, stretching and turning enough to see him. His eyes are barely open. He looks… softer. Younger. Some of the lines around his eyes have eased. She stares at him for a long moment, trying to sort out the tumbled emotions within her chest. She knows now what it feels like to kiss his mouth and throat and shoulders. She knows the way the muscles in his back move during the sweetest of exertions. She…

He brushes his knuckles back across her cheek, jolting her from the spiral of her thoughts. He asks, searching her gaze for something, “Everything alright?”

Outside of their little huddle of space, outside of the room beneath their furs, where their limbs tangle together, nothing is alright. But that is not what he speaks of, and she pushes the ache in her chest to one side. She presses into his touch, instead, until he rolls onto his back and she can lean over him, kissing his mouth softly. “Yes,” she says.

And for a while, she speaks the truth. Everything in the universe is perfect.

#

The new aspect of their relationship does not change much of their day to day existence, beyond offering some sweetness and peace to the rest of the misery they face. Outside of the walls of their home, the air grows colder and the days grow shorter with a startling speed. They do what they can to stock up on food, to hunt what they can for furs and skins.

There is no way for them to know how long a winter on this planet will last, or how severe it will become. So far the weather here has been unrelentingly brutal. They cannot expect anything but the same from the coldest months.

They eat less, on the days they can bear it, stock-piling magically preserved meats and fruits. They gather wood and store it within the wall surrounding their home. They make themselves crude coverings of fur that do little to keep out the chill of the air. 

And they craft weapons, as Shiro originally suggested so long ago. They are pitiful things, made of wood and bone, stone when they are lucky enough to find it. But they make hunting easier, and it feels good to have a staff at hand again, to have a knife to slide into the sinew belt Allura ties around her waist every morning.

#

The first snow hits like a fist, the storm clouds building and building in the sky. They dump heavy, wet flakes down onto the world below, burying the ground, the trees, and their home. Allura does not stand outside to watch it come down, as she might once have. Heat is precious. She cannot waste it by standing outside. It is so hard to warm up again.

She dreams, that night, with the snow piling up outside, of being buried alive, of screaming for her friends and clawing desperately at wet, dark earth as it fills in around her nose and mouth. Shiro shakes her awake, leaning over her. He says, “Sh, sh, it’s just a dream, you’re just dreaming.”

Allura grabs him, thrashing free of the restrictive furs that make up their bed. She gulps at the air, sweat breaking out across her shoulders and under her arms. The dream had been so real. Perhaps because it is. They have been buried on this planet, for all intents and purposes, buried while they still live, left to rot and decompose, abandoned by their friends and the universe at large, forgotten.

“Sh,” Shiro says, rocking her back and forth, “I’ve got you.”

She nods, rubbing her forehead back and forth across his shoulder. The universe has forgotten them, everyone must surely think they are dead by now.

But at least they have one another.

#

Winter brutalizes them. The clouds dump first inches of snow and then feet of it. And nothing seems to quiet the wind that blows through the trees, piling the snow into heavy drifts and battering their home. They must dig their way out, every time they wish to exit their abode, and the cold outside bites at their flesh more cruelly than any beast.

They drag in the wood they gathered and ration out their meagre stores of food. Allura prays to the old gods of her people that the winter will be short, but she doubts she will be answered. They are alone on this rock. Utterly alone.

They talk, as the snow builds a tomb for them, and they touch, and they hold one another, afterwards.

“I am glad you were with me,” Allura says, one night as the wind whips around their home, howling with the voices of the damned. She traces patterns on Shiro’s arm, following the lines of his veins and arteries, each beat of his pulse reassurance that he lives, despite all the planet has thrown at them. “When the Thyshilians brought me here. I know I should not be. But….”

But the thought of being alone here, truly and utterly alone, is too much to bear. She would have died so long ago, drowned as a fever ate through the reserves of her strength.

Shiro shifts, turning so he can look into her eyes. He tucks some of her hair back behind her ear and smiles, a soft thing. “I’m glad, too,” he says, and his kiss is soft and sweet, something so wonderful it feels as though it should have no place in the nightmare of their existence.

She pulls him closer.

#

Winter drags around them, bringing one new misery after another, the newest being the strange darkness that has settled over the world. It is as though the sun has disappeared utterly from the sky, leaving them with little more than a varga or two of light every day.

Not that it matters. The snow is such that they can rarely venture outside, not without risking frostbite. They spend hours watching their fire, honing their weapons, loving one another. They spend more time than that sleeping, as though their bodies are determined to hibernate.

Sometimes Allura worries that they will just not wake up. That perhaps the cold will creep in on silent feet and steal away their breath. She is having another dream that she is buried alive on a night plagued with such fears, when a terrible sound rends the air in twain.

The noise jerks Allura from a dead sleep and halfway to her feet, all in one movement. Her head spins as she stands within their home, and she sways, her inner ear trying to keep up with the abrupt change in position, but she cares little for the impact of her shoulder against the wall. Shiro makes a groggy, confused sound by her feet, but she can barely hear it.

She knows the noise, that tremendous boom of sound felt as much as heard, reverberating through the air and the earth and her bones. She scrambles for the door, Shiro calling, “Allura, what—?”

“A ship just broke atmo,” she blurts, the words all tumbling together. A ship, a ship, a ship, finally a ship. Finally, the others have found them. They have come, impossibly. They have survived the intervening phoebs somehow and they have come. 

Shiro curses breathlessly, surging to his feet as Allura sprints through the doorway, ignoring the way the snow drags at her legs, turning her gaze skyway—it is lucky they arrived during the short vargas of daylight—looking for the longed-for shape of the Castle, for the Lions, surely rushing already down to the surface, surely—

Allura freezes as something cold and unforgiving reaches into her chest and closes around her heart, claws digging into her lungs and prying her ribs apart. Her legs shake. Her stomach clenches hard on nothing, but nausea swims up the back of her throat, anyway. She forgets how to breath, how to blink, how to move.

She wheezes, “No.”

And she stares up at the gigantic ship lowering towards the planet’s surface, all black and purple and cruel angles, terribly familiar. It is all of her nightmares given shape and form. 

Zarkon’s flagship.

Shiro surges from the door, then. It has only been ticks since Allura stepped outside, since the world broke. She feels him freeze beside her. She notes, with some distant part of her mind, the way his breath catches, the way he recoils back, just a little.

She says, through numb lips—the freezing air is driving crystals of ice against her face—as the ship races towards the surface, “He found us.”

And she reaches out. And she takes Shiro’s hand. His fingers are as cold as ice, limp under her touch for a moment, before he comes to life and squeezes back, hard, with pressure that would be crushing for anyone without her strength.

“We must—we must go,” she says, the words coming from far away, the way they do in a dream. The world seems to be glowing white around the edges. Perhaps she has not remembered how to breathe yet. She shakes her head, ripping her gaze away from the massive ship in the sky and tugging at him. “Shiro, come, we have to go.”

“Go where?” he asks, his voice flat. There is something wrong with his expression. It is… empty. Snow gathers in his beard. They forgot to put on the fur wraps they use to protect their faces. “He tracked us here, how long will it take him to find us in the woods?”

“We—I do not know, but, but we cannot just stay here.” She pulls on him again, disregarding the care she usually takes not to move others against their will. She bodily hauls him back into their house, to their weapons standing by the door, spears and knives made of bone and wood. Their blades stand no chance of piercing Galra armor. She knows that. But they have nothing else.

She presses one of the spears into Shiro’s hand, and he holds it only loosely. “Allura,” he says, “we can’t—there’s no where to go. We—we can’t run from them. I tried before. They. They’re going to take us.”

“Not without a fight,” Allura says, because that promise is all she has left to offer him. They will not go without exacting some small price in blood. They will not.

“No,” Shiro says, shaking his head, his eyes still strangely and terribly distant, “no, listen. Maybe if we—look. Maybe we can—if we let them take us prisoner, they’ll take us off this planet, right? And then we can find a way to escape, we can—”

Allura laughs, sharp and bitter, and it stops Shiro’s words immediately. His jaw clicks shut, and she says, into the quiet void left behind, “They will not take me prisoner. That is not Zarkon’s way.”

Shiro is quiet for a moment. Some life comes back into his eyes. He says, “He took you prisoner before.”

“No.” Allura shoves a knife into her belt. “The Galra on the station took me prisoner to bring me to Zarkon. My execution was planned for little more than a varga after your rescue. It was delayed only because his witch was giving him some kind of treatment.”

Shiro shudders, reaching a hand up and scrubbing at his face, jerky and too hard. For a moment she thinks he will be ill. “That’s…” he says, and his voice is thick. “Okay. We have to get out of here.”

Allura twists her mouth, not really into a smile. “Yes. We know this place. We may be able to evade them for a time. Perhaps we can ambush a patrol and take their weapons.” It would be a pathetic victory, one she feels will be ultimately useless, but she cannot just give up. It is not in her, not when faced with Zarkon himself.

Shiro nods, moving all at once now, gathering some of their food stores into a bag they made from his shirt and slinging it over his shoulder. They are out the door in moments, moving fast through the woods, the shadow of Zarkon’s flagship falling across the land and darkening the sky prematurely. “Maybe if we do this right we’ll be able to sneak onto the ship,” Shiro says, as they hurry onward. “We could steal a smaller craft, get out of here before they know what’s happening, and—”

Allura never finds out what would have come after that in the mad, desperate plan. The forest ahead opens into a small clearing, one she has passed so many times before and never given a second glance.

She freezes now, recoiling, a cry caught in the back of her throat.

Zarkon stands in the clearing, looming, obscenely large in his grotesque battle armor. He stares directly at them, waiting. He holds a familiar sword in one hand. The Black Bayard. And he needs say nothing about how he got it, he needs make no boasts: he has the Black Bayard. Allura knows what that must mean for the others.

She knows what that must mean for the universe. Wild grief fills her chest. She has failed, failed utterly and completely. She has languished here while the universe needs her. She let down her father, her people, all the other peoples who counted on her to set right this terrible wrong.

She failed, and the proof stands across from her. Zarkon looks… monstrous. He does not look like the man she remembers from her childhood. He looks like a monolith. Like death made flesh. White creeps in at the edges of her vision, narrowing her view of the world.

She does not understand how he reached them so quickly. His ship has not even touched down. He—

He moves, lifting his blade. Shiro grabs Allura and hauls her backwards, putting his body in front of her and yelling, “Run!”

Allura stares at the back of his shoulders for an instant; so much is happening, she feels as though she cannot keep up with it all. But she does not need to keep up with everything. She only needs to grasp this moment, this fight, this monster set against them. He took the Black Bayard. He has brought nothing but death and destruction to the universe. And she has failed. But perhaps she can still make him pay for some measure of his crimes.

The white recedes from her vision, all in a rush.

She steps out from behind Shiro, her heart overfull from his attempt to buy her the time to escape her fate for… for a few moments. She twirls her spear and falls into a defensive stance, and Shiro cries out, gutted. He says, “Allura, please, please get out of here, I can—”

“I will not leave you,” she tells him, sparing him a glance, trying to say all the things that she needs to say with her eyes. They have not the time to speak them. Zarkon takes a step forward. She tilts her chin up and says, “If this is how we die, then we die together.”

He stares back at her, his eyes so dark in his pale face. He wears no armor. So much of his weight has been stripped away by this place. But in his expression, she sees the warrior spirit that is fundamental to his being, that can never be removed. His jaw tightens. He nods. He says, a promise, “Together.”

“A touching vow,” Zarkon says, his voice a rumble like thunder. “And one that I am happy to help you fulfill.”

And then he is on them.

#

Zarkon’s armor was designed to protect against the fire of ships, of Voltron itself. His weapons were crafted to cleave metal, to carve apart mountains, to take whatever shape needed. He is immense, larger than Allura remembered, and impossibly fast for his size.

They are armed with sticks and rocks and bones. They wear furs and the tattered remains of their clothing. They are both half-starved. 

The odds in a direct fight with Zarkon were always going to be against them.

Now their chances for victory are so minimal that they do not even bear mentioning.

They fight anyway. There is nothing else before them to do but lie down and die. Allura yells out, dodging away from a blow and aiming a strike of her own at Zarkon’s body. Her weapon breaks to splinters in her hand, and Zarkon laughs. Shiro jumps in from his other side, moving fast and quiet, and gets batted aside.

Allura expects to die in seconds, but perhaps they are both too stubborn for that. They dodge and scramble and fight, tooth and nail. Their weapons are useless, but Allura is strong, she manages to land a punch against Zarkon’s side, putting every bit of rage and desperate she feels into the blow, and a hairline crack runs up his armor. Their weapons are useless, but Shiro’s hand glows, and Zarkon cries out when Shiro rakes it across his elbow—the injured arm falls limp and useless.

The fight does not end in seconds. It drags out as the forest around them is destroyed, trees sundered by Zarkon’s tremendous body. Allura cannot breathe fast enough to satisfy her muscles. Her heart hurts, along with a dozen wounds. But sparks are rising off of Zarkon’s armor. He is breathing hard, too. He limps when he tries to move.

Allura spits blood and charges back in, landing blows, losing track of time, of everything but the fight, until Zarkon swings a blow at her head and she manages, somehow, to catch his wrist. And she realizes, holding his massive arm, digging her fingers in so hard that metal buckles around her nails, that she can hold him in place, at least for a moment. She yells, unsure what she wants him to do, “Shiro!”

She needed say nothing. Shiro is already there, coming in from behind. She catches a glimpse of his face, set with determination, and the glow of his hand, and then he is eclipsed by Zarkon’s body. And a second later Zarkon spasms, purple sparks pouring out of his mouth.

Allura stares at him, wide-eyed, feeling his arm shake and tremble in her grip. They—they won. Shiro is killing him. He must be. He—they won, they—it does not seem possible. They— She laughs, the sound raw and choking. Zarkon’s arm goes limp in her hold. The sparks coming out of his mouth tapper off, and his face goes lax. Allura’s chest feels full to bursting, her mouth is full of blood, she—

And then Zarkon shakes his head and resettles his shoulders. Shiro makes a startled sound, thrown by the movement into one of the few trees still standing. Allura cries out, confused, as Zarkon’s wounds close. He seems to loom even larger. She tries to jerk away from him, needing a chance to regroup, and his other hand is just there, impossible—Shiro ruined that arm—closing around her throat.

He squeezes, his face twisting into a rictus grin as he lifts her off of her feet and brings her close to his face. He asks, “You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?”

Allura kicks her legs over empty air, ripping at his fingers to no effect. His grip only tightens. Shiro screams, something terrible and raw: her name. Allura thrashes, desperate, if she can just—

Something inside her neck cracks.

She feels death, like a shivery rush of heat down her spine, and Shiro makes a sound she has never heard, like someone is ripping him apart, and—and then—and Zarkon is smiling—and there is white—and—and—

#

Allura wakes with a scream caught in her throat, surrounded by bright, clear light and a sweet smell. She jerks, sitting up—she is on, on some kind of bed, there are blankets over her legs. She kicks them off, jittering sideways, off of the bed. She does not understand what is happening. She does not—the world no longer makes sense. Nothing makes—

“Shiro!” she yells, taking a stumbling step away from the bed. Her legs feel strange. Her body feels strange. Her eyes are bleary. She shakes her head, hard, trying to clear her vision. “Shiro!” She has to find him. She has to find him, and then somehow the world will make sense again.

“Allura!” Shiro sounds like someone is carving him open. Allura jerks towards the sound, her nerves on fire. There’s another bed, and a shape thrashing around on it. Shiro. It has to be Shiro. 

“I’m here,” Allura says, too loud, “I’m—”

And then Shiro, or the blur of shape that is probably Shiro, is off of the bed. Familiar hands catch at her arms, pulling her close. “What’s—what’s going—are you alright? Allura? Are you alright?”

“She is unhurt.” Allura recognizes that toneless cadence. It’s one of the Thyshilians. She blinks rapidly, her vision finally clearing enough that she can make out the room they’re in. It has walls. Clean walls of blue and green. There are two Thyshilians standing to one side, watching them. One says, “Merely disoriented.”

“Are you—Allura, are—talk to me, talk to me, please,” Shiro demands, running his hands over her shoulders and her sides. She jerks her gaze back to him. He is—he is beardless. The stark thinness of his features is gone. He is wearing his uniform. She is wearing her dress. 

“I am—I am—what is going on?” she demands, because she does not know what she is, not really. She thought she was dead, only a moment ago. She thought the universe lost. And now none of that seems to be true. She turns on the Thyshilians. “What did you do to us?”

The Thyshilians smile at her, both of them pressing the tips of their fingers together in front of their chests. “We administered a test,” one says, “it is our standard procedure to assess—”

Shiro moves past Allura like a shot. He reaches the Thyshilians, violence written in every movement. There is a bang as he lifts one Thyshilian off of his feet and slams him against the wall. The Thyshilian’s feet dangle off the ground. Shiro is breathing so hard his shoulders heave. He says, his voice painfully contained, “You’re calling that a test? You made me watch her die.”

The other Thyshilian steps forward. He does not seem overly concerned about his fellow, currently gripping at Shiro’s wrist. He says, “Yes, we did. It was necessary.”

Shiro cocks his head to the side. There is something icy cold in his voice when he says, slow and deliberate and terrible, “Necessary.”

“We had to understand you,” the Thyshilian says. “Your strengths. How you would handle hopeless situations. How you would face your greatest fears. And now we do. We find you to be most impressive. You lasted longer than anyone else we’ve ever put through the test. Every time you got close to failing, you pulled yourselves back. It was... unbelievable. We have never had to go so far in the past.”

Allura wants to throw up. She is not sure if it is a side-effect of whatever… test they administered. “Our greatest fears,” she says, trying to process that. “That is—how could you do such a thing?”

“It is our way.” The Thyshilian inclines his head, then, something sorrowful passing across his face. “But we do apologize for any… ill-effects resulting from the process. Now. Your friends are waiting for you. And we are ready to finalize our alliance.”

Allura stares at him, his calm expression, his folded hands. The phoebs they spent on that planet play through her head. She swallows heavily and says, “Shiro. Put him down.”

“Allura,” Shiro says, and he sounds gutted, still. Allura touches his shoulder and then looks at her hand on his armor. It is strange not to feel skin beneath her fingers. The world feels off-kilter. “I—they—”

“I know,” Allura says. “But killing him will change nothing. And it would be… a shame, to lose the alliance, after all of that.”

Shiro does not move for a moment, and then he nods, stepping back. The Thyshilian slips down the wall, and Shiro turns away from him, flexing his hands. It is so strange to see his face clean-shaven. He grabs Allura, looking her over again, asking, “Are you sure you’re alright?”

She manages to smile, somehow. She should be fine. She is warm for the first time in so long. She does not feel hungry at all. Her body does not hurt anywhere. It is strange, then, that she feels so out of sorts. She says, “I will be. Let us… find the others.”

#

The Thyshilians show them to the rest of their crew. Shiro keeps a hand on Allura the entire time. “Hey, wow,” Hunk says, spotting them first and hurrying over, “that didn’t take anywhere near as long as I thought it was going to. So, how did it go? The big test thing? I bet you guys passed. You passed, right?”

“Looks like,” Shiro says, his voice odd, the words just a little delayed. Perhaps he is busy staring at the others. Allura certainly is. It has been so long since she’s seen them. She feared that she was going to forget what they looked like. They are… unchanged. Glorious. She feels such a swell of fondness for all of them. It nearly chokes her throat.

She shakes her head, trying to focus on the important things. She asks, “How long was it?”

Hunk blinks at her and then looks over at Pidge. “Uh, I guess we’ve been here about an hour? And we spent about an hour in the city, before they came to get us, so… Two hours. Maybe two and a half.”

Allura shudders. Two and a half hours passed for them. She and Shiro spent nearly an entire deca-phoeb on that planet. Her stomach turns over again.

“Is everything alright?” Pidge asks, frowning over at them and then past them to the Thyshilians. “Because they said you were both going to be fine. They said there was nothing to worry about.”

“Of course,” Allura says, smiling stiffly. “But we should return to the Castle to begin plans for the alliance.”

#

The Castle feels like foreign territory. Allura stands in the hangar, staring at the wide open space, trying to will it back to familiarity. Shiro lingers by her side. They have spent so long together, they learned so well the danger of being apart. Allura walks forward in a daze, wandering the halls of the Castle. Two hours. Almost a deca-phoeb.

They end up back at Allura’s room, eventually. Allura stares at her bed, for one disorienting moment expecting to see a pile of furs. Shiro exhales heavily beside her, once the door is shut. He says, tension in his voice, “This is—this is incredibly strange.”

Allura laughs, shakily. “Yes. Is—was it all a dream, then?” She does not know how to label the experience and it seems, standing in her near-forgotten room, necessary that it be labeled.

“I don’t—I guess.” Shiro scrubs his hands over his face. “But it, I mean. I felt pain. I don’t, I don’t know.”

Allura turns and wraps her arms around him. It is strange to embrace him with the armor. She does not like it. She reaches up and touches his cheek—hairless—and then runs her fingers through his shortened hair. He has grown so familiar to her; the sudden changes are disorienting. The way he leans into her touch is not. It is the one normal thing she has.

She rocks up and kisses him, and, yes, it is strange without the prickle of his beard. But it is not bad. And it settles something inside her chest. “Come to bed,” she says, carding her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck. “Perhaps everything will seem clearer in the morning.”

#

Nothing seems clearer in the morning. Allura wakes up warm, expecting to blink over at the furs covering the walls. The Castle’s walls for a moment make no sense, nor does her soft mattress. She shivers, and Shiro murmurs, tightening the arm he has flung over her waist. It calms the flutter of her heart. Not everything has changed. She uses his familiar breath as an anchor to order her thoughts.

Her stomach rumbles, then, and she almost ignores it before she remembers that she does not have to. 

She sits bolt upright, then, realization sending a shock through her system. “Allura?” Shiro asks, waking immediately. “What’s wrong?”

Allura stares down at him and then throws off the blankets over her legs. “We can eat breakfast,” she tells him. She watches his eyes widen as his expression transforms. They trip over one another, heading for the door, passing Lance, who drops what he was holding and stares after them, and heading for the mess hall.

Allura eats until her stomach hurts, looking over at Shiro every other moment and matching him smile for wide smile.

#

Allura showers, after eating, the hot water a revelation. She stays under the spray until her skin wrinkles and steam fills the room. Afterwards, she combs out her hair and styles it, her fingers hesitating when she reaches for one of her brushes. She misses, abruptly, the comb of bone that Shiro carved her.

But it was never real to begin with. She blinks, looking away from her reflection and pulling on a shift, clean and whole and so, so strange.

For a moment all she can do is stand there, looking down at herself and feeling as though the world is rolling off its axis.

And then Shiro knocks at the door and says, “Allura? The Thyshilians are wondering when we’re going to be ready to meet with them.”

#

Shiro insists on the meeting taking place on the Castle and forbids any of the others from returning to the planet. The others argue—apparently they have places they’d like to visit—but subside when Allura says, “Shiro is right. You are all to stay on the Castle.” She will not risk… any more tests.

The Thyshilians do not protest the choice of venue. They seem happy to be given a tour of the Castle. Allura smiles at them and conducts the discussions as best she can, grateful for Shiro’s presence by her shoulder. He is still strangely quiet, but they are both adjusting to their new circumstances.

The creation of the treaty is largely painless. The Thyshilians seem utterly innocuous, now, and very eager to form an alliance. “It is a great honor to work with you,” the ambassador says, after the last of the agreements has been concluded. She looks over Allura’s head, at Shiro, and sketches another bow. “And you as well.”

“The honor is ours,” Allura says, the words stilted and automatic on her tongue.

She watches the Thyshilian delegation leave, afterwards, and feels some of the pressure bearing down on her shoulders dissipate.

#

Shiro is quiet that evening in her quarters. Twice he opens his mouth as though preparing to speak and then visibly bites back the words, shaking his head. Allura has gotten used to watching him, to reading his moods. She has gotten used to touching him. She threads their fingers together and asks, “What is wrong?”

He stares down at their joined hands and there is something sad in his eyes, before he shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says, stroking his thumb over hers. “I’m just still… wrapping my head around everything. I think I might… go for a walk.”

“Alright,” Allura says, standing. “Where would you like to go?”

Shiro looks at her. He looks, suddenly, deeply uncomfortable. And she realizes he meant to go on his own. “Oh,” she says, releasing his hand, feeling heat stinging at her skin. “I—of course. I forgot that we—of course. I. Have a nice walk.” Remembering that they no longer need to be around one another every moment of the day will take some getting used to.

“Right,” Shiro says, “yes. I’ll just…” He gestures at her door, and she nods, walking him over. She watches him walk down the hall, trying to ignore the itch in her gut that insists this is dangerous, that she should stay with him. Anything could happen to him. Anything—

No. No, they are out of that test. They are back on the Castle. They are allowed to be apart. Allura shuts her door and stares at it, her hands flexing by her sides. She wants to go check the fire, but there is no fire to check. She covers her mouth with her hands, instead, and breathes.

She is still standing there when someone knocks on her door. “Allura,” Shiro calls, from the other side. “Allura? Are you—”

She opens the door and finds him wide-eyed, breathing hard. She steps to him, and he catches her in an embrace. He says, “Sorry, I’m—I thought I could do it. But you’re alright? You’re fine, aren’t you?”

“I’m fine,” she agrees. She is fine, except she does not know how to be away from him. She is fine, except nothing here is familiar. She is fine, except for the hundreds of ways that she is not. She holds him a little tighter.

“Tomorrow,” he says, “tomorrow we’ll do better.”

#

The following days are strange. Relearning how to live with people is a difficult process, and Allura knows they confuse the others. They have gotten used to silences, to knowing what the other means with only a few words. They have private jokes that make them laugh and leave the others staring at them as though lost. And they touch one another, now, in a way that the others are obviously not used to.

It took phoebs to get to the point where it felt normal to just reach out and touch Shiro’s arm, to straighten his hair, to hold his hand. It would be strange to no longer have him touch her back, or curl an arm around her shoulders. The first time she leans up and kisses his jaw, unthinking, Pidge drops the tray of food she was carrying and chokes on nothing.

“Are you okay?” Shiro asks, bending to help Pidge clean up the mess.

“What?” Pidge asks, her voice going high and fast. “Me? Of course. Just… clumsy.”

“Right,” Shiro says, “of course.” They finish their task, and he sighs as Pidge hurries off. His fingers go to his wrist, a movement Allura grew so used to in the test. He is looking for the bracelet he made of her shift, looking to turn and worry it between his fingers, as he used to when thinking.

Allura’s chest tightens. She encircles his wrist with her fingers, and he sighs, leaning into her, resting his head briefly against hers.

“Look,” he says, eventually, his voice rough and quiet. “Allura. I’ve been meaning… Since we’re here, now, I’ve… Maybe we should…”

Allura leans back enough to look at him. He looks pained. She asks, “What? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says, after a moment, shaking his head and leaning into her touch. “Never mind.”

#

They cannot stay together indefinitely. Nor should they, Allura knows. The behaviors that kept them alive in the test are not well-suited for their lives outside of it, their real lives. But that is hard to remember. It takes a mission for them to really put that knowledge into practice.

The first time they separate, it is strange and terrible. Allura’s chest aches the entire time and she feels jittery, half-sick by the time the fight is over and she can check on him. He seems to be in no better shape, and even afterwards, when they are both sure the other is well, she catches him picking at the missing bracelet around his wrist.

The second time is easier, or at least Allura tells herself that it is.

By the third time, she is at least getting used to it. By the time they split apart without a mission—because the others are dragging Shiro off to some swap meet or another they found—she has learned to deal with the unpleasant uptick in her heartbeat and the steady thrum of anxiety until he returns.

It helps to keep busy. But the Castle’s systems can only provide so much work, and she, eventually, ends up back in her quarters. She paces and plays with the mice, but even that cannot hold her attention. She wants to call for an update on the status of the team, but exercises restraint. This excursion is necessary. Shiro needs to bond with the others for a bit. They need to relearn how to interact with one another outside of a battle situation.

The mice chitter, sensing her distraction, and she smiles at them wearily. “I think perhaps I would just like some quiet,” she tells them, and they concede, exiting her room with a single backwards glance. It is only after they are gone that she realizes being alone is no better than having them around. She bathes, to give herself something to do, but it leaves her feeling no more settled. She drops down onto her mattress, staring up at the ceiling and picking at her shift before she sits straight up.

The idea comes to her all at once, fully formed, and she is lifting the hem to her teeth and tearing it before the moment passes. She rips the fabric all the way around, ending up with two long strips of white fabric. She looks at them, her heart pounding, and then wraps them together. By the time she is done, she has a length of rope long enough to circle Shiro’s wrist. She sets it on the mattress and looks at it, then down at the fraying hem of her shift.

She destroyed it without thought. She reaches out, carefully, trailing her fingers over the ragged strings. He might not even want the reminder of the time. She swallows, covering her face with her hands and wishing he were back.

#

Shiro arrives back in the middle of the night. Allura wakes at the sound of her door—she is not sure she will ever sleep soundly again—and relaxes when she sees him outlined against the doorway. “Hey,” he says, quietly, “I didn’t want to wake you, but…” He winces.

Allura understands. “No,” she says, rising off the bed, from her place atop the blankets, and crossing to him, “I am glad you did.” She embraces him, the jittery nerves beneath her skin settling at his presence. “Did you have a pleasant trip?”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, leaning his cheek against the top of her head. “I—we needed that time together. Everything was okay while I was away?”

“Mm, yes.” Allura pulls back, just a little, looking him over. “Though I missed you.” 

“You, too,” he says, the tips of his ears tinging with red. “Actually, I was thinking about—I mean, I saw this.” He pulls a package from one of the pouches on his belt. He presses it into her hands. “At the swap meet. And I thought you might… I know it isn’t much, but I thought maybe you’d like it.”

Allura picks at the paper that wraps it, discovering a slim box within. She glances at him and then lifts the lid and sucks in a breath. A comb rests within. It is made of some type of bone, something cool to the touch and incredibly smooth. It is extremely light when she lifts it. The tines are smooth. It is almost a perfect recreation of what he made for her. “It is beautiful,” she says, running her fingers over it and smiling up at him.

He swallows, his eyes dark as he looks at her. “I’m glad you like it,” he says.

Her cheeks heat. The present reminds her of what she spent their last evening apart working on. “Actually…” she says, stepping away, over to the bed, where she finds the bracelet lost in the blankets. She plays it between her fingers and then offers it out. “I… It is not as fine as your present. But. Here.”

Shiro takes it without speaking. He might be holding his breath. “Oh,” he says, after a moment. He pulls off his glove and then his vambrace. He ties the fabric into place around his wrist, pulling the knots tight with his teeth. Something in his expression relaxes then, all at once, before tightening again as he looks over at her. “But your shift—”

“There are plenty of clothes in the universe,” she says, smiling at him. “I… wanted you to have it.” He twists it almost immediately, pulling it around and around his wrist.

He says, “Allura…” and bends, kissing her sweet and deep. When he pulls back, he does not go far. She strokes her thumb up and down his neck, so relieved to have him back that at first she thinks nothing of it when he draws in a breath and says, “I, thank you. It’s—thank you. But I should have—before I took it, I should have—look, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. About what happened. During the test.”

Allura blinks at him. His gaze slides to the side. His cheeks seem abnormally pale. “Alright,” she says, cautiously. “What did you want to discuss?”

“I—just, okay, I know that what happened was—everything that happened in there was crazy. And it was just the two of us. We only had each other. Things were bound to—it was an emotionally charged situation, and I know that now that we’re not… in it, things might—”

Allura takes a step back from him, a sudden chill creeping over her skin. She asks, wondering suddenly if she is dreaming, still waiting for him to return, “What are you saying?”

He looks to the side, twisting her bracelet and then catching himself and wincing. “I’m saying… I’m saying that I know you didn’t, you know. Feel that way. About me. Before we went in there. And we were—it was just us, in there. You had no one else. And I wasn’t trying to take advantage. But I thought it was—I thought we both needed it. And now that things are normal again, I’m not expecting you to—I don’t want you to keep doing this if you don’t really want—”

“Is that what you want?” Allura interrupts, barely hearing the words. They seem as though they come from far away. Her mouth feels numb. “To no longer… do this?”

Shiro makes a rough sound, shaking his head once, hard. “No, no that’s—I’ve been in love with you for—for so long.” Allura shivers, staring at him. For a moment she thinks of protesting. Surely she would have noticed such affection on his part, but… But she held little consideration for affairs of the heart, before their experience. And the test played on their greatest fears, the Thyshilians said. And what scenario had Shiro been faced with, over and over again?

She says, somehow finding a way to be heard over the thunder of her heart, “You love me?”

He nods, still not meeting her eyes. “But that doesn’t—this isn’t about me. I don’t—I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to feel like you have to—”

He cuts off when Allura steps back up, cradling his face and pushing onto her toes, kissing his mouth. He wraps his arms around her with a strangled sound, pulling her close. She litters kisses across his face, before drawing back just far enough to look into his eyes. “I have to do nothing,” she tells him. “But I cannot imagine going on without you. I love you.”

Shiro makes a wordless sound and kisses her once more, so thoroughly that for a while the rest of the world slips out of focus.

Allura does not mind. She is finally feeling confident that it will be there when they have the time to spare for it.


End file.
